Like her short La Bouche De Jean-Pierre (1996) and her features Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015) and Earwig (2021), Lucile Hadžihalilović’s latest, The Ice Tower, offers an unnerving, surreal take on a young person’s coming of age. It begins with a female voiceover narrating part of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’, accompanied by a fragmented kaleidoscope of snow-globe images (icy mountains, a tower) as though filtered through the distorting prisms of a crystal.
Jeanne (Clara Pacini) not only knows ‘The Snow Queen’ by heart, she also lives in a wintry, Alpine village whose snow white sierra resembles the illustrations from the book, which she regularly reads to her much younger foster sister, Rose. Not as old as she claims to be, but yearning precociously to get out into the adult world, Jeanne runs away from the warmth and comfort of her foster home on a quest for mother love. What in fact she will find is her own sexual objectification, as well as a model of icy resilience and strength in Cristina van den Berg (Marion Cotillard), a middle-aged actor who is now playing the Snow Queen in a film production at the studio building where Jeanne has sought refuge from the elements.
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From the moment Jeanne first sees Cristina, resplendent and imperious in her sparkling costume, she is enchanted by this strange, beautiful woman who insists on always getting her way, and has the director, Dino (Gaspar Noé), cast and crew terrified of her diva-like behaviour. Cristina has also noticed Jeanne and is quick to take the young girl under her wing – although what exactly she wants from Jeanne is not at first clear in a scenario where both are performing a role and both are impostors.
What is clear is that Cristina was herself once a foster child, and for her, the chilling damage has long since settled into permafrost, so that she is trapped in her own cycles and addictions, and readily corrupts those around her. So whether Cristina offers an exemplary fable or a cautionary tale, she embodies a possible future for Jeanne (and Rose), unless – like Gerda in ‘The Snow Queen’ – they can escape the icy grip of destiny.
Here an established fairy tale is combined with a fantasy film (and its behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings), and with the anxious, aching dream life of an adolescent, with the result that Andersen is fostered in the same household as David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), and even Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932). For this is, from beginning to end, a Bergfilm, much as Cristina’s surname is van den Berg, which, with its spurious intimations of nobility, may be as pseudonymous as Jeanne’s own adopted identity, ‘Bianca’ (bringing her close to Snow White).
The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night. For it is a shadowy frío-noir, complete with femme fatale, even as its elusive, edgy narrative is passed down, like keepsake beads or diffracting crystals, from generation to generation.