Ice Tower Review – Marion Cotillard focuses on obsession and apotheosis in death wish fiction | film

AA frightening and unhealthy spell is cast in this film; It is a fantasy story of death longing and erotic submission. He brilliantly fuses reality and fantasy into a state of ecstasy – a state I’ve sometimes found a bit static in Lucille Hadzihalilović’s previous films, but not here. Dreamily bizarre (and indeed, on the face of it, utterly preposterous), this film had me hooked with its two stellar performances – by Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini – and its raucous musical score.

Cotillard plays a singing film actress named Christina, the lead in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, shot on a soundstage set in a remote, snowy location in late 1960s France; She is gorgeously dressed in a form-fitting, sparkling white gown and crown, a look she carries with unsmiling grandeur. Pacini plays Jane, a teenage girl in a nearby nursing home, who is plagued by memories of the death of her mother, whose beaded necklace she keeps. In her loneliness and grief, Jane turns her feelings into an obsession with the story of the Snow Queen, an obsession that is also replaced elsewhere by the worship of teenage girls who ice skate at the local rink. One day she ran away, stole the identity of an older girl named Bianca, and broke into a movie studio to sleep through the night; She somehow gets an extra job, astonished when she realizes the story being depicted, and here her beauty and the queen’s delicate and demure air of adoration catch Christina’s attention.

Cristina’s somewhat gruff director Dino, played by Hadzihaljlović’s partner, Gaspar Noe, has a habit of telling potential young actresses that he might cast them in his next project, a Hitchcockian thriller. Indeed, there is something Hitchcockian in this shot, with the bird attack, and in Christina’s cold, cruel detachment from the victim’s suffering. Hadzihalilović may intend for us to spot in one shot a poster for The Red Shoes, but the Powell/Pressburger film he most closely resembles is certainly Black Narcissus with its feminine desire and delirium in the bitter mountain cold.

Christina and Jane become very close in a dangerous way, even though the younger woman is always subject to Christina’s whims and fancies, the star behaviors that Christina has learned to impose her status and hide her weakness. There’s a great shot of Jen’s stunned look as she flips through the pages of Christina’s magazine profile. She learns, along with the audience, that they have a lot in common: Christina herself was once in a foster home, and appears to have been mentored and protected in her early years by a confidant, Max (August Diehl), who calls himself her friend and doctor. Was Max prescribing certain medications to Christina?

The scenes in the film allow us to be transported to the set of The Snow Queen, as if in a dream; It’s a production design that creates the world of ice in all its seductive artificiality, with the ice tower in one shot juxtaposed with the statuesque poise of Christina. We can feel what Jane is feeling in amazement: that she has miraculously found herself in the ice world with the Ice Queen herself. But what does Christina want from Jane – and what does she want from Christina? It’s a mesmerizing melodrama, mixing sensuality and reeling anxiety, balancing on the precipice of disaster.