‘The Ice Tower’ Review: Marion Cotillard Toplines a Twisted French Fairytale That’s ‘Frozen’ Meets ‘Mulholland Drive’
Like a distant French cousin to the late David Lynch, but with a name significantly harder to pronounce, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic has been making bizarre, intricately crafted movies for over two decades now. A rarity in Gallic cinema, where talk-heavy dramas and comedies tend to be the norm, her quietly disturbing films, which include Innocence, Evolution and Earwig, often put children in hazardous situations where horror, sci-fi and fantasy come clashing together in highly artful ways.
Her latest feature, The Ice Tower (La Tour de glace), is no exception, weaving a twisted retro fairytale that sits somewhere between Frozen and Mulholland Drive. Starring Marion Cotillard, who also headlined Innocence, it’s the kind of movie where it’s better not to know much before going in. Suffice it to say that if you’re looking for a Disney film or a horror flick, or perhaps both, The Ice Tower isn’t really any of those things.
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It’s also rather slow-going at nearly two hours, with a plot that didn’t need so much time to reach its troubling conclusion. Hadzihalilovic is an extremely skillful filmmaker, and every shot here is eloquently composed — from snowy landscapes tinged with fading blue light, to warm interiors outfitted in postwar dressings, to the many close-ups of Cotillard, playing an ice queen of an actress whose antics haunt a problematic movie set. But The Ice Tower doesn’t grip you as much as it asks you to gaze at its hazy, nightmarish imagery, and either fall under its sway — or not.
Set in a remote mountain village in the 1970s, the story (written by Hadzihalilovic and regular co-scribe Geoff Cox) is crafted as an Old World children’s tale set in a place that’s both eerily real and utterly weird. The tale’s teenage heroine, Jeanne (Clara Pacini, a talent to watch), lives in a foster home, where she looks after a younger girl named Rose (Cassandre Louis Urbain). But Jeanne wants nothing more than to run away to the nearest city, where she hopes to meet up with a friend at an ice-skating rink.
Instead, she stumbles onto the set of a film starring legendary actress Cristina Van Der Berg (Cotillard), who’s playing the same snow queen-character we heard about in the opening fairytale. Jeanne manages to work her way into the movie as an extra, getting closer to the frosty, diva-like Cristina, who winds up taking the girl under her wing. Things only get stranger from there, with Hadzihalilovic introducing unusual parallels between the two, such as the fact that they’re both orphans and increasingly look and dress alike.
The Lynchian doubling continues throughout the second half of the movie, while a more disturbing theme we didn’t see coming starts to emerge. Without giving too much away, let’s say that whatever freakish antics were happening in the make-believe world of the movie set are no match for the frightening abuses of real life.
Like Hadzihalilovic’s other films, there’s little dialogue to guide the narrative, whose array of dreamy visuals speak for themselves. Working again with DP Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things), the director constantly blurs the lines between reality and fiction, fact and fantasy, with transfixing imagery that could belong in either realm. Production designer Julia Irribarria enhances the atmosphere with sets that bring the winter landscapes indoors, shrinking them into miniatures in which the actors suddenly appear like human puppets trapped inside a creepy kids’ show.
As the film-within-a-film’s famous star, Cotillard doesn’t need to say much to make her presence felt. Shot in soft light like the Chanel fashion icon she now is, the actress emits a Garbo or Dietrich-like aura, terrifying those around her — especially the young extras forced to play in her scenes — with temper tantrums that are quelled, it seems, by heroin or some other drug that a doctor (August Diehl) administers to her between takes.
Rounding out the cast is Gaspar Noé, cameoing as an Italian director named Dino. Back in the early ‘90s, the iconoclastic filmmaker founded a production company with Hadzihalilovic, who was then his partner. Both have gone on to pave unique paths in the French movie world, and while the latter’s new feature can be a patience-testing affair, it proves she has an uncompromising voice — one that continues to whisper strange, scary things into our ears.
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