This film evokes a haunting and unhealthy spell; it's a fairy tale of death-longing and erotic submission. It ingeniously merges the real and the fictional into a trance-like state, a state that has sometimes struck me as somewhat static in Lucile Hadzihalilovic's previous films, but not here. As strange as it may be (and indeed, at first glance, utterly absurd), this film captivated me with its two outstanding lead performances—from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini—and a strident soundtrack.
Cotillard plays a diva-like film actress named Cristina, the protagonist of a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, filmed in a studio in a remote, snowy location in late 1960s France. She wears a magnificent outfit, a glittering, slinky white gown and crown, a look she carries off with great haughtiness and seriousness. Pacini plays Jeanne, a teenager in a nearby foster home, haunted by memories of her mother's death, whose beaded necklace she keeps.
Director: Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Writers: Geoff Cox, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Alante Kavaite
Stars: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl
In her loneliness and grief, Jeanne has projected her feelings into an obsession with the story of the Snow Queen, an obsession that, on another level, transforms into the idolization of teenage girls who ice skate at the local rink. One day, she runs away, steals the ID of an older girl named Bianca, and sneaks into the film studio for the night. Somehow, she gets a job as an extra, amazed to realize the story being filmed. It is here that her little-girl beauty and air of demure, sensitive reverence for the queen catch Cristina's attention.
Cristina's director, Dino, played in a cameo by Hadzihalilovic's colleague Gaspar Noé, often tells young actresses that he might include them in his next project, a Hitchcockian thriller. In fact, there's something Hitchcockian about this shot, with the bird attack and Cristina's cold, cruel indifference to the victim's suffering. Hadzihalilovic may have intended us to see a poster for The Red Shoes in a single shot, but the Powell/Pressburger film it most resembles is undoubtedly Black Narcissus, with its feminine desire and delirium in the icy cold of the mountains.
Cristina and Jeanne grow dangerously close, though the young woman is always subject to Cristina's whims, the stellar gestures Cristina has learned to assert her own status and mask her vulnerability. There's a great shot of Jeanne's astonished gaze as she flips through a profile of Cristina in a fashion magazine. She discovers, along with the audience, that they have much in common: Cristina herself was in a foster home and seems to have been guided and protected in her early years by a male confidant, Max (August Diehl), who presents himself as her friend and doctor. Has Max been prescribing Cristina some medication?
The film's sequences transport us to the set of The Snow Queen, as if in a dream. It's a production design that recreates the ice kingdom in all its seductive artificiality, with the ice tower juxtaposed with Cristina's own statuesque pose. We can feel what Jeanne feels, dazed: that she has miraculously found herself in the ice kingdom with the ice queen herself. But what does Cristina want from Jeanne, and what could she possibly want from Cristina? It's a hypnotic melodrama, mixing sensuality with unsettling anxiety, teetering on the brink of disaster.
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