Review: The Ice Tower

Director:  Lucile Hadžihalilović

Stars:  Clara Pacini, Marion Cotillard, Gaspar Noé

The first time I attempted to watch the latest effort from Lucile Hadžihalilović, I fell asleep. The second attempt confirmed that I initially lasted around 11 minutes. This is not an indictment of the film but rather a response to a combination of elements, from my own tiredness to the cosy cinema air conditioning that had super-heated the screening room. In the dark and warm I was very easily lulled. 

But part of that lulling was Hadžihalilović’s doing. With David Lynch sadly gone, the French filmmaker might be our preeminent exponent of dream cinema. Hers is an oeuvre of slowly revealing languorous worlds, where the viewer is sent untethered to a place rarely interested in explaining its own interior logic. Like Lynch, sound is as vital as her images, and The Ice Tower is a decidedly hushed experience. The music tinkles quietly when it isn’t couching the viewing in soft pads of synth, or otherwise we’re being surrounded by the kinds of comfortable soundscapes that sleep apps use to help us drift off (distant rain, the thrum of a car interior…). That master of Thai slow cinema, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, has said before that he doesn’t mind if people sleep during his movies. One senses that Hadžihalilović is almost encouraging it. Dialogue is kept to a minimum and most scenes are typified by quietude. The Ice Tower is a hushed world.

But by using her cinema to dream I was missing one of the year’s more beguiling treasures, something that was revealed to me on attempt #2.

Ostensibly we’re dealing with Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 fairy tale ‘The Snow Queen’, which teenage Jeanne (Clara Pacini) reads at night to her younger sibling Rose (Cassandre Louis Urbain). Jeanne leaves the family homestead having promised Rose she’ll bring back a souvenir should she meet the Queen. Traversing alpine conditions, Jeanne takes shelter from the elements in a warehouse which transpires to be the shooting location for a film adaptation of the very same tale. Playing the titular role is a diva named Cristina van den Berg (Marion Cotillard) whom most of the crew seem fearful of, including the director (Gaspar Noé!).

Cotillard is an established collaborator with Hadžihalilović, having appeared in her art house breakout Innocence from 2004, but her increased celebrity since makes her casting particularly savvy, working for the picture through our extant associations. It’s a similar trick to the placing of Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin or, much more recently, Alexander Skarsgård in Pillion. A shorthand appreciation of out-proportioned legacy. An effortless largess.

Once discovered, Jeanne assumes the identity Bianca, having stolen the ID of a girl she admired at a local ice rink, a sequence which keys us in to her blossoming sexuality. Unexpectedly, Cristina takes ‘Bianca’ under her wing, allowing her to play a part in the film as an extra, then elevating her to another actor’s double. And so doubling intensifies as The Ice Tower inexorably unfurls. Both child and star are playing parts, for themselves and for one another – a seemingly tacit agreement – reflective of the schism between their exterior projections and the myriad interiority of their respective personalities. As things progress we ultimately learn that Cristina was a foster child, with an upbringing that is inferred greatly mirrors Jeanne/Bianca’s. Given the liminal sense of reality promoted by Hadžihalilović, one comes to wonder if Cristina is an older version of Jeanne herself.

Many of their interactions take place in an artificial snowy wasteland, an elaborately imagined fairy tale world that’s a mirror for the landscape outside, albeit more controllable. There’s an inherent absurdity in manufacturing a replica of what’s readily available at arm’s reach. Hadžihalilović’s steady investigation of this absurdity feels redolent of Peter Strickland’s sensibilities, albeit greatly muted, as though the great British eccentric were working at half-speed and half-volume. Fold in the fetishisation of the Snow Queen costume as a potent symbol of actualised (albeit fantastique) feminine adulthood, and the kinship to Strickland only grows. Audience patience levels may vary as The Ice Tower is stubbornly slow-paced, but give in to these somnambulist rhythms and you’ll find a film that’s actively offering you so much to admire in its construction of mood and accumulation of feeling. 

This only intensifies once the narrative takes Jeanne/Bianca and Cristina/The Snow Queen out of the filming studio and onto a road trip into the frozen wilderness that holds them forever at its centre like a snow globe. Their shared appreciation of a view so intrinsically bound to their respective connections to ‘The Snow Queen’ feels incredibly intimate, expressive of a precious mutual appreciation. Still, the nature of what Cristina fulfils for Jeanne and vice-versa maintains a tension beneath it all, one that Cristina ultimately calls out in their climactic meeting. It is in this sequence that Hadžihalilović addresses the looming age-cap concern and obliterates readings of their mutual infatuation as levelly sexual. It’s a dark, openly problematic encounter saved by Jeanne’s discovered agency.

The Ice Tower disperses just as it emerged, refracted in slowly spinning crystal shards that act as windows into other worlds. A visual anteroom. Likewise, the film has left itself spinning in my mind, turning this way and that as I look back at it, contorting into different things as both of us move away from one another. A prism of allusions and meaning that shimmer over my conscious mind before the shadows claim them. If such pungent prose is objectionable, blame the movie that has, in waking, encouraged me to dream on it. This strong recommendation comes with the proviso that Hadžihalilović will demand – but reward – your committed attention.