(Lucile Hadžihalilović, France/Germany/Italy, 2025, 117 minutes)
How beautiful she was. So perfect!
--A narrator describes The Snow Queen
Lucile Hadžihalilović's The Ice Tower, in which a fairy tale becomes real, opens with kaleidoscopic shapes, like icycles made from crystals or the shards of a mirror, dancing across an indigo sky to an enchanting ondes Martenot score (I assumed it was a theremin until I read otherwise).
Even before a narrator (Saint Omer's Aurélia Petit) describes The Snow Queen's castle in voiceover, the French filmmaker, who wrote the screenplay with Geoff Cox (Evolution, Earwig), has conjured up a heightened atmosphere, something that could be said about all of her feature films to date, starting with 2004 Frank Wedekind adaptation Innocence.
She then focuses on the rosy-cheeked face of Jeanne (22-year-old newcomer Clara Pacini), a dreamy, yet resourceful 15-year-old gazing at a snow-covered mountain in the Swiss Alps in 1970. There's no castle or tower in sight, but the image in her mind comes from the 19th-century book, Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, that she reads to her foster sister, Rose (Cassandre Louis Urbain), every night before bed.
Jeanne is the oldest of several orphans all sharing the same overcrowded, if cozy-looking cottage. She's restless and unhappy, and the film has barely begun before she takes off, by walking, climbing and hitchhiking, to the nearest, not-so-close town. It's a somewhat treacherous journey, complete with potential predator, but she arrives intact and no worse for wear.
Her journey ends, momentarily, at an open-air ice rink, where she's mesmerized by Bianca (Valentina Vezzoso), a long-limbed skater of great skill, but after everyone leaves, she's alone in the dark with no place to go.
Jeanne finally finds a storage room in which to sleep, though she wakes to room-temperature snow floating through the air and the sight of the glittering, white-garbed Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard reuniting with the director 20 years after Innocence) through a peep hole, but what seems like a dream is real–the building houses a soundstage. Jeanne has seemingly manifested Andersen's tale.
Before too long, she reveals herself to a crew member, who allows her to explore the backstage area. To another, she claims to be an extra, and finds herself in the film, but what sounds like pure wish fulfillment plays as sufficiently believable, though I wouldn't say that verisimilitude has ever been one of Hadžihalilović's top priorities. Notably, her partner, Gaspar Noé (wearing a hairpiece), plays the film-within-a-film's director, and I don't think it's completely coincidental that the maker of a film starring Argento, 2021's Vortex, actually resembles the Italian actor/director in this one.
As for Cotillard, she may not have been a star when she first worked with Hadžihalilović, but since then she's modeled for several French designers, graced the covers of numerous fashion magazines, starred in nearly two dozen English-language films and over 30 French ones, and won most every award, including an Oscar for 2007's La Vie en Rose. I've never heard that she's difficult, but she's as famous in real life as the fictional Cristina.
Jeanne becomes intrigued by her ambiguous relationship with Max (German actor August Diehl, who appeared with Cotillard in Robert Zemeckis's 2016 spy thriller Allied). She watches Cristina watching herself in rushes, and imitates the way she smokes. Cristina catches her in the act, and asks what she finds so fascinating. Jeanne cites the Snow Queen's power and immortality. Cristina, however, sees the Queen as lonely, which may be how she sees herself–and how she sees Jeanne, too.
Just as the opening sequence proves disorienting, I couldn't always tell when Jeanne was dreaming that she was exploring the grounds of the Ice Tower or just exploring a set. As the director confirmed to Indiewire's Ryan Lattanzio, "At some point, the idea of blurring the border between the dream and reality was the purpose of the film." Though Jeanne starts out as part of an ensemble, she ends up playing a unique character who looks like a younger version of the Queen with similar silvery makeup and platinum blonde hair.
As they get to know each other, it isn't clear if Jeanne wants to be Cristina, finds her desirable, or sees her as a mother figure–Cotillard's oldest child is around the same age--but Cristina seems to see her younger self in Jeanne. All of these things can be true, and for a time, Cristina helps to make her threadbare life more comfortable, though it's clear there will be a cost.
The cost, when it arrives, is both inappropriate and disturbing, and Jeanne takes it as a sign that it may be time to go. Along the way, Hadžihalilović reveals what happened to her mother, though I don't recall any mention of a father. Then again, fathers leave little impression in Hadžihalilović's work, if they appear at all (this takes extreme form in 2015 sci-fi oddity Evolution, in which women conceive without the aid of men).
In the end, Cristina is a wolf in chic clothing, even if the director drew primarily from a different fairy tale. There's no woodsman, however, as in Kelsey Taylor's PNW-set To Kill a Wolf, a more grounded take on Little Red Riding Hood (if you missed the summer screenings, Taylor and cinematographer Adam Lee return to town this fall at SIFF Film Center).
Jeanne is on her own. If she sees herself in Cristina, and if Cristina--who also grew up in a foster home–sees herself in Jeanne, it isn't too late for one of them to start anew.
Life, on the other hand, imitates art, since The Ice Tower is a smaller, more idiosyncratic film than those, like Michael Mann's Public Enemies or Christopher Nolan's Inception, with which Marion Cotillard has come to be associated during her post-Academy Award career.
Like Pacini, she's very good here, and the experienced actress and the ingenue work well together. Cotillard next appears, alongside Ornella Muti and Django legend Franco Nero, in an Italian adventure from another European master of the fantastique: Bertrand Mandico.
From Innocence through The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović has placed women at the center of her work, especially young women trying to make sense of a world that does not always have their best interests at heart. It makes her films suspenseful and even a little scary, but these aren't horror movies; they're coming-of-age pictures made with great empathy and imagination, and this is surely one of the most beautiful she has made.
Headline note: French author Charles Perrault originated Little Red Riding Hood in 1697 before the German-born Brothers Grimm revived it in 1812.
The Ice Tower opens in limited release on Fri, Oct 3. No Seattle dates yet, but I'll update this post once it becomes more readily available, whether by theatrical engagement, home-video release, or streaming platform. Images from Yellow Veil Pictures (Marion Cotillard and Clara Pacini in and out of character) and Penguin Random House (2000 edition of The Snow Queen).
