As a child, I had always been scared of the Snow Queen. A mirror that shatters and infects a heart with coldness, the “kidnapping” of the infected boy, and the quest for Gerda to save said boy, her friend, against the villainous Snow Queen – the story always unsettled me.
The Ice Tower dispels no such feelings.
Directed by Lucile Hadžihalilović, the film features 16-year-old Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Jeanne is an orphan who is obsessed with the Snow Queen. She yearns for a less isolated life than the foster home she is stuck in, and runs away to the city. With nowhere to go and having only three beads from her dead mother’s necklace in her possession, she seeks shelter in what she believes is an abandoned building. Instead, she finds herself on the set of a film adaptation of the Snow Queen.
At first watching from behind the slits of the backdrop, Jeanne becomes enamoured with the volatile and mysterious Cristina (Marion Cotillard), who plays the Snow Queen in the film-within-a-film. In a twist of fate, Jeanne gets mistaken for an extra, and forms a close bond with Cristina. At first communicating through silent glances and secret smiles, she eventually cements the bond once she realises Cristina was also a product of the foster system.
Cinematically speaking, a dark sense of foreboding permeates the film. Its icy aesthetic, coupled with the long silences and droning high notes sound designer Ken Yasumoto has chosen to soundtrack the film, has been carefully curated to portray a sense of coldness, not only temperature-wise, but in emotion as well. Indeed, it is apparent that emotion is what Hadžihalilović is most concerned in conveying, rather than a narrative. And in this, she is spot on.
The viewer has no choice but to root for our young protagonist: the chutzpah with which she embraces each new opportunity that she creates for herself, much like Hans Christian Andersen’s original Gerda; her ability to survive in a hostile environment, with nothing but a stolen handbag; and her eventual realisation that her idol was perhaps not who she initially hoped she would be.
Ultimately, The Ice Tower is not so much a retelling of the classic 1844 fairytale, and more about capturing its emotional core. Hadžihalilović crafts a realm where admiration undergoes a slow freeze into disillusionment, fantasy blurs into reality, and childhood innocence is tainted past dazzling facades into cold.
The Ice Tower is showing at the Alliance Française French Film Festival from 19th March until 10th April.