The Word ‘Eternity’: A review of The Ice Tower
By Aksharaa Agarwal
Vast and glitteringly empty are the rooms of the Snow Queen’s arctic castle. Those words could also aptly sum up the impression that The Ice Tower imparts. Opening to fractured images, it is already a flight, from source, from stability. One of a myriad kinds of losses. With an undercurrent of twinkles, a pace that has been described as glacial, and yet, an unexpected pulse of magnetism, Lucile Hadžihalilović crafts an atmosphere that somehow manages to render the distinct effect of a thin, sharp plane of frozen ice met edgewise.
A winter fallen upon desperations, the pale expanse commands. The white vista absorbs, pain and personhood buried for the season in snow. The oldest child at the orphanage, Jeanne can only heed the call. Not so much taken by the fairytale, the discovery nested within danger, as enamoured by the titular figure, she flees. Neither abandoned destinations nor aimless dithering can foretell or forestall the fate she is to meet. Locking eyes with her through a fissure in the woodwork, tokens are staked, and a barter is brokered.
Like Persona, or Black Swan, it’s shapes of self and shadow. Evocation. Innocence and its double. Encircling each other like opponents in a ring or locked in a dance, the enigmatic actress and the adolescent, her pet; whom she almost lures following their accidental encounter. The Diva and the Debutante perform their duet, an old tale of extraction, corruption. Marion Cotillard extends herself into the captivating Cristina Van Den Berg, whose legend and iciness cannot be extracted from the Snow Queen’s own. Gaspar Noé, a longtime friend and collaborator to Hadžihalilović, appears as the struggling director Dino, adding a sort of Dario Argento flair to the production therein.
Despite its embellishments, it is not quite as dark, dazzling or delicate as it is deceptive. No detail, not even the story it loosely adapts, prefigures the direction it stands to take. Further, from its reworking of the source material and its stylisation, to its lingering and eventual stranding, The Ice Tower is not a watch for just anyone to undertake. Fantasy shatters into shards of futility. As if it can only carry one so far before suspending; for all its enchantments, the tower itself, as one will come to find, remains in fact no more than a figment of the imagination.