Marion Cotillard in Artsy French Grownup Fable

Like a distant French cousin to the late David Lynch, however with a reputation considerably more durable to pronounce, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic has been making weird, intricately crafted films for over twenty years now. A rarity in Gallic cinema, the place talk-heavy dramas and comedies are typically the norm, her quietly disturbing movies, which embrace Innocence, Evolution and Earwig, usually put kids in hazardous conditions the place horror, sci-fi and fantasy come clashing collectively in extremely suave methods.

Her newest characteristic, The Ice Tower (La Tour de glace), isn’t any exception, weaving a twisted retro fairytale that sits someplace between Frozen and Mulholland Drive. Starring Marion Cotillard, who additionally headlined Innocence, it’s the type of film the place it’s higher to not know a lot earlier than entering into. Suffice it to say that when you’re in search of a Disney movie or a horror flick, or maybe each, The Ice Tower isn’t actually any of these issues.

It’s additionally somewhat slow-going at almost two hours, with a plot that didn’t want a lot time to succeed in its troubling conclusion. Hadzihalilovic is an especially skillful filmmaker, and each shot right here is eloquently composed — from snowy landscapes tinged with fading blue mild, to heat interiors outfitted in postwar dressings, to the numerous close-ups of Cotillard, taking part in an ice queen of an actress whose antics hang-out a problematic film set. However The Ice Tower doesn’t grip you as a lot because it asks you to stare upon its hazy, nightmarish imagery, and both fall underneath its sway — or not.

Set in a distant mountain village within the Nineteen Seventies, the story (written by Hadzihalilovic and common co-scribe Geoff Cox) is crafted as an Outdated World kids’s story set in a spot that’s each eerily actual and totally bizarre. The story’s teenage heroine, Jeanne (Clara Pacini, a expertise to look at), lives in a foster residence, the place she takes care of a youthful woman named Rose (Cassandre Louis Urbain). However Jeanne desires nothing greater than to run away to the closest metropolis, the place she hopes to fulfill up with a buddy at an ice-skating ring.

As an alternative, she stumbles onto the set of a movie starring legendary actress Cristina Van Der Berg (Cotillard), who’s taking part in the identical snow queen-character we heard about within the opening fairytale. Jeanne manages to work her manner into the film as an additional, getting nearer to the frosty, diva-like Cristina, who winds up taking the woman underneath her wing. Issues solely get stranger from there, with Hadzihalilovic introducing uncommon parallels between the 2, similar to the truth that they’re each orphans and more and more look alike.

The Lynchian doubling continues all through the second half of the film, whereas a extra disturbing theme we didn’t see coming begins to emerge. With out giving an excessive amount of away, let’s say that no matter freakish antics have been taking place within the make-believe world of the film set are not any match for the scary abuses of actual life. 

Like Hadzihalilovic’s different movies, there’s little dialogue to information the narrative, whose array of dreamy visuals converse for themselves. Working once more with DP Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Style of Issues), the director always blurs the strains between actuality and fiction, reality and fantasy, with transfixing imagery that would belong in both realm. Manufacturing designer Julia Irribarria enhances the ambiance with units that convey the winter landscapes indoors, shrinking them into miniatures through which the actors out of the blue appear as if human puppets trapped inside a creepy children’ present.

Because the film-within-a-film’s well-known star, Cotillard doesn’t must say a lot to make her presence felt. Shot in comfortable mild just like the Chanel style icon she now’s, the actress emits a Garbo or Dietrich-like aura, terrifying these round her — particularly the younger extras pressured to play in her scenes — with mood tantrums which are quelled, it appears, by heroin or another drug that a health care provider (August Diehl) administers to her between takes.

Rounding out the solid is Gaspar Noé, cameoing as an Italian director named Dino. Again within the early ‘90s, the iconoclastic filmmaker based a manufacturing firm with Hadzihalilovic, who was then his accomplice. Each have gone on to pave distinctive paths within the French film world, and whereas the latter’s new characteristic generally is a patience-testing affair, it proves she has an uncompromising voice — one which continues to whisper unusual, scary issues into our ears.