The fairy tale The snow queen is one of the longest and most complex works by the renowned Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen. Classics like the princess on the pea and the little mermaid come from his pen. In the unusual fantasy drama The Ice Tower of director Lucile Hadzihalilovic, it is the favorite story of the young main character Jeanne-who suddenly seems to dive into the magical world of the fairy tale and meets a very real snow queen.
The film, which runs in the competition of this year’s Berlinale, designs this meeting as Sleepwalking journey of discovery, which at some point makes speechless. If you don’t equate slow films with boring films.
A special fantasy trip feels like an endless tumor through the night
In The Ice Tower, the 16-year-old main character clings to Andersen’s fairy tale as if it were the most powerful history of the world. Maybe the story of comfort and hope may donate to her to escape the everyday life of the small orphanage, in which Jeanne lives in the valley over a French city in the 1970s.
One day, during the snowy Christmas season, she escapes and plunges out of the icy slope into a new world that Lucile Hadzihalilovic stages with slightly ranged realism. As Jeanne (Clara Pacini) hikes through this place completely disoriented at night, a trance is like a drunken trance – and gives that strongly decelerated narrative pace for the rest of the action.
At a film festival like the Berlinale, works like The Ice Tower can be curse or blessing. If you are bombarded every day with a wide variety of impressions in the cinema, Hadzihalilovic’s film may be a patient test, in which you have to take your eyes off several times. The meditative, licking suction effect of The Ice Tower can also trigger pleasant relaxation that saves the Berlinale Day.
Like a magical lifeline, the refuge, where the protagonist of The Ice Tower finally gets lost. Jeanne can be found in a building that turns out to be a film studio in which one Adaption of the Andersen fairy tale is turned.
The director takes around an hour to observe how the main character sneaks in and around the set. When Jeanne as a statistess itself becomes part of the staging, The Ice Tower like the main character slips at the beginning. What follows is a sensual, dark dance between the film set, imagination and fairy tale world.
Marion Cotillard shines in the Ice Tower as a human fantasy base.
At the fixed point, Marion Cotillard as actress Cristina van der Berg is developing. She is not only occupied as a snow queen, but also appears behind the camera as an appearance floating over the things. Cristina speaks of her role as a tyrant and monster and the film remains unclear whether she incorporated these traits when shooting or has already started with the best conditions.
Cristina plays Cristina as a fragile diva, which is one of the gifted French actresses through films like La Vie en Rose. In one moment she looks strangely vulnerable when the German acting star August Diehl appears as a doctor Max and injects a mysterious substance. At the other hand, Cristina sits like a icy Grande lady before the film’s test shots, who is never satisfied.
As a man-made fantasy, she becomes obsession and danger for Jeanne. Your counterpart is Cristina Missing mother figure and fairy tale projection in one person. Hadzihalilovic plays with the question of whether this snow queen, like the figure from Andersens, demands a victim of everyone who loses her heart to her.
In the fairy tale of the Danes, the little girl Gerda is looking for her missing playmate Kay, who was kidnapped by the snow queen. A dark adventure develops from this, at the end of which the characters return as adults.
For The Ice Tower, the director prefers to look for cinematic starting points when Jeanne looks curiously like Amélie through holes in the wall, how Winona Ryder in Tim Burton’s Edward moves through the winter landscape with the scissor hands and reachesbehind which Alice seems to hide in Wonderland.
In the end you look at The Ice Tower like a child on one of the snow balls in which after shaking the white beads slowly trickle on a miniature landscape. Strangely fascinated and full of relaxed happiness.
We saw The Ice Tower as part of the 75th Berlinale, where the film is in competition. He does not yet have a German theatrical release.