The Ice Tower: Marion Cotillard Imperial at Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Critique)
In Savoy of the 1970s, an orphan in fugue finds refuge in a film studio, where a great actress takes it under her wing … A bewitching tale on illusion and predation.
Children prisoners. All the films of Lucile Hadzihalililovic begin with them, these young protagonists cut off from the world, living under bell, awaiting their release, worried about what awaits them outside. There was the little girl stuck in the infernal HLM of the Middle Pilgue Shock The mouth of Jean-Pierre, the residents of the mysterious internship of innocence, the boys-cobayes of the island of Evolution, the under-residence supervised by Earwig … The ice towerfourth feature film of one of the rarest (therefore precious) French directors, contrasts immediately with its previous ones, since it begins with an escape. A deliverance.
In the snowy Savoy of the 70s, Jeanne (Clara Pacini), an orphan living in a household in the high mountains, fugue and goes on an adventure, towards the city below. You have to see a declaration of intention, as if the cinema of Hadzihalilovic had itself decided to “open up”-as we open our arms by wishing someone welcome. Coming after the very hermetic Earwig, the ice tower is the most welcoming of its films. If only because he has a headliner superstar (Marion Cotillard, already in the credits of innocence, in 2005), but also because it takes place in the real world, and no longer in distant phantasmagorical universes. However, in front of Hadzihalililovic’s camera, everything is tale, “Once upon a time”. The motorist who hitchhikes the heroine has the air of a big wolf wolf, and an illuminated ice rink in the night by a song by Aphrodite’s Child becomes a kind of hallucinated mirage.
The escape of the escape will actually be short -lived; The outside world is far too scary. The fugueuse finds refuge in a film studio, where an adaptation of her favorite tale turns, the snow queen, which she will first observe in secret, from behind the scenes, before participating. Andersen’s tale is itself a distant inspiration of the ice tower: the queen has become a film star there, and the studio is her castle. Marion Cotillard plays this role-mirror of Diva de Celluloid, a distant, sublime, terrifying, terrifying, terribly attractive, which will soon begin a vampiric relationship with the girl. She is a slightly wilted actress, in an era, the seventies, which was obsessed with the 1930s and the memory of Marlene Dietrich – looking at Marion Cotillard, we think a little of the Delphine Seyrig of the red lips, and a lot of the Veronika Voss of Fassbinder. Faced with her, Clara Pacini, who embodies Jeanne, upsets by her fragility, her shyness, this fluette voice that we sometimes tell herself that she risks breaking – like ice.
It was almost inevitable that Lucile Hadzihalilovic, filmmaker of the mystery of childhood, the autarkic worlds, the bewitchment and hypnosis, ended up making her great film on cinema. Nourished by the memory of some directors and bedside films (here we meet the shadows of Hitchcock, black narcissus and red slippers), she pursues, with the director of the photo Jonathan Ricquebourg, a work on the sparkle, the Kaleidoscopic light, the broken mirrors, which was already at the heart of Earwig. If his cinema gives today the impression of opening, it is also because his concerns of always suddenly meet those of the time – in particular the question of links between art and predation. Is this studio where the illusion is made the place of a release, or just a new prison? In the changing reflections of this magic film, cinema is both the world of all possibilities, and that of all dangers.
By Lucile Hadzihalilovic. With Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl … Duration: 1h57. Released September 17, 2025
