Lucille Hadžihalilović continues with her coming of age/dark fairy tale with The Ice Tower, taking on Hans Christian Andersen's The Ice Queen. And just like her previous films (Innocence, Evolution and Earwig), it's a visual stunner. The director has a penchant for painting the grownup world as something disturbing and mysterious and The Ice Tower is no exception.
The film concerns a runaway teenage orphan girl Jeanne (Clara Pacini). She is fascinated with the Ice Queen story and the dark icy forest, as she reads the book to her younger foster home sister every night. She runs away into the frozen mountains and ends up in another town, after a close encounter with a predatory old man while hitchhiking. She breaks into what appears to be a warehouse to spend the night, but the building turns out to be a film studio staging the production of The Ice Queen. Jeanne, now taking on the identity of a stranger named Bianca, gets the attention of Christina (Marion Cortillard), a diva movie star with a similar history as Jeanne. The cold, sad façade of Christina gets an obsessive attention from wide eyed Jeanne. With Jeanne's mother dying in freezing cold when she was young, Christina becomes an embodiment of a maternal figure, idol and fantasy all in one.
With their past mirroring each other, Jeanne/Bianca becomes Christina's new favorite, being promoted for the stand-in for the young actress who plays the main role. Christina, a possibly a depressed drug addict (suggested without so many words), has a death wish and wants Jeanne to join her at the edge of the cliff one night but Jeanne refuses.
The Ice Tower is a kaleidoscopic mood piece that plays around with the idea of mirroring images - fantasy and reality, past and present, darkness and light. Cortillard is perfect as an alluring ice queen who attracts people around her to their destruction and suffers from eternal loneliness in her frozen kingdom. The film, shot by Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things, The Death of Louis XIV), is seriously dark and moody, and makes the best of its frozen, shiny and empty Northern Italian landscapes.
Ice Tower, just like her previous films, Hadžihalilović aptly suggests the frightening grownup world where things are not as bright and exciting as one hopes to be, but decidedly dour, sad, full of pain and filled with ugliness. Her explorations might be seen as only scratching its shiny surface. But it's usually the negative space behind the façade that looms over all of her films, keeping all the mysteries intact and bewitching us to come back time and time again to see her dark and hypnotic artistry.
