Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen has inspired two beautiful Soviet features, an early computer game for the Commodore 64, an anime series, a Hallmark movie featuring swordfights and Bridget Fonda, and megahit Frozen.
Despite the 1970s setting, The Ice Tower, a mesmerising and mysterious new adaptation directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, preserves the wondrous wanderings of Andersen’s longest fairy tale.
“Fairy tales are often read by parents to their children, and some of them are very cruel and very bizarre,” says the French-Bosnian film-maker. “There are a few stories I especially loved, like The Little Mermaid, because it’s so complex, or The Travel Companion, and of course The Snow Queen.
“I was very intrigued by the figure of the Snow Queen herself and her uncomfortable encounter with the girl. I wanted to explore what that means for her. And for me.”
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Hadzihalilovic’s work has always hovered between the material and the imagined. Across her films Innocence, from 2004, Evolution, from 2015, and Earwig, from 2021, she has built immersive worlds where the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, body and landscape, intersect.
The Ice Tower, which has its Irish premiere as part of the Irish Film Institute’s French film festival this week, continues that exploration, weaving together myth and cinema in a tale that casts Marion Cotillard as Christina, a movie star headlining a new production of The Snow Queen. The newcomer Clara Pacini plays Jeanne, a teenage runaway who becomes obsessed with the enigmatic diva.
“It’s tricky to think too much about casting when you’re writing, especially if it’s a very famous actress,” Hadzihalilovic says. “But before the script was even fully ready I had thought of Marion.
“We’d made Innocence together 20 years ago, before she was famous. Then, by accident, I met her at a party. She was very friendly and said that she’d seen her father a week before, and he told her that the most artistic thing she’d ever done was Innocence. So I thought, Oh, the stars are aligned.
“There are not so many actresses with her stature in France. She really is the kind of woman I admire. Someone out of time yet very grounded.”
The extraordinary Pacini was cast very early in the process, during an open search. Last year Hadzihalilovic placed a callout on social media for the dual roles of Jeanne and Bianca. Pacini immediately stood out among the thousands of young hopefuls who applied.
“When we began casting I already knew Marion would play the actress, but I didn’t mention it to the girls,” says the writer-director. “Clara arrived on the very first day. I continued to see others, of course – I had to – but she was unique.
“Immediately I thought, She’s exactly the kind of girl I would put in my film. She’s delicate and graceful yet also quite strong. Her silhouette, the determination in her walk, all suggested something deeper.
“I felt she would bring strength to a character who isn’t just a victim. She hardly needed to speak. Her eyes already revealed an inner life.”
Born in Lyon to Bosnian Yugoslav parents, Hadzihalilovic spent much of her childhood in Morocco before returning to France as a teenager. Her films, while resolutely European in sensibility, carry a texture of displacement, belonging to several worlds at once.
That quality often emerges through her use of setting: the thickly forested school of Innocence, the otherworldly volcanic island of Evolution, the dreamlike corridors of Earwig.
In The Ice Tower the environment is as psychologically charged as its predecessors’. The film was largely shot against the striking, dislocated shapes of Bolzano, a northern Italian city where, in the 1940s, modernist and proto-brutalist forms were deliberately imposed on classic Austro-Hungarian boulevards. Add a skating rink and it’s a perfect evocation of the 1970s.
“With my cowriter Geoff Cox, we felt the story belonged before the 1980s,” Hadzihalilovic says. “A girl like Jeanne could still approach that world with mystery and imagination. Today everything is overexposed, and so much magic is lost.
“Also, the 1970s were when I myself was a teenager. We found Bolzano largely for production reasons, but visually it was ideal: modernist, partly built during the fascist era, oddly timeless. It blurred geography beautifully. The film is French, but the city doesn’t look French. It feels Italian and something else: very European.”
Drawing from such disparate inspirations as Dario Argento’s Deep Red, Juraj Herz’s Beauty and the Beast, and Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, The Ice Tower is meticulously designed. Every image has been precisely thought through. Even the Snow Queen’s dress – already a hit on social media – carries narrative weight.
“The costume designer Emilie Malfaisan worked so hard,” Hadzihalilovic says. “We didn’t have much money, so she had to find creative ways to make it look like something really amazing. It’s close to another queen’s dress. Really like a fairy tale.”
Their reference point was Warner Bros’ lushly budgeted 1935 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring James Cagney, Mickey Rooney and, in her big-screen debut, Olivia de Havilland.
“We looked at A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Hadzihalilovic says. “It was beyond our reach, but it was an inspiration. All the magic of that film inspired us.”
Any variation on The Snow Queen must lean into the Nordic weather – and consider how it affects people who live amid snow and ice. The Ice Tower is no exception.
“It was a bit cold in the mountains,” the director says. “But in the studio we made it warmer. We wanted that contrast between the warmth of the actress’s room and the icy world of the queen. Marion herself has this very warm, sensual presence, but sometimes she can be cold. I wanted to play with that tension.”
Hadzihalilovic already had an affinity with the speculative literature of Malcolm Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon and HP Lovecraft when, at 17, she entered La Fémis, France’s most prestigious film school, where she studied art history alongside cinema. The school’s rigorous technical programme affirmed her instinctive pull towards film as a sensory, dreamlike medium.
In the early 1990s she began collaborating closely with Gaspar Noé, her partner, forming a culturally impactful creative bond. She edited and produced Noé’s short film Carne and his famously uncompromising debut feature, I Stand Alone. In return Noé shot Hadzihalilovic’s own first short films.
Forty years into their film-making collaboration, Noé – known for his confrontational style – appears as the director of The Ice Tower’s film-within-the-film.
“I didn’t expect people to talk so much about it, because it’s really a small role,” she says. “My options were either to choose an actor or ask an actual director who could evoke a certain fairy-tale authority.
“I thought of someone like Mario Bava or even Guillermo del Toro, though of course Guillermo could never spare days just sitting around on set. Then it occurred to me that Gaspar would be perfect. He’s very natural in front of the camera and knows how to navigate a set. He even has a slightly Italian quality. It was fun having him play an anti-Gaspar figure.”
The Ice Tower has received a rapturous welcome since premiering at Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution. In addition to five-star reviews, audiences have been particularly receptive, even if, amusingly, Hadzihalilovic did have to kindly explain to an audience member at the London Film Festival premiere that, no, she didn’t make the film about his mother.
“I love hearing the interpretations people bring, especially at festivals, and sometimes they’re wonderfully unexpected,” she says, smiling. “My films are open to multiple readings. The only difficulty is when viewers want to be certain they’ve interpreted everything ‘correctly’.
“They ask: ‘What’s the message? Am I right?’ And I always say that if they feel something, then yes, they’re right. It doesn’t revolve around a single meaning. It’s about sensation, not message.
“And the cultural context really matters. Some countries have audiences who are much more open to ambiguity than others. That variation is exciting to witness.”
The Irish Film Institute’s French film festival begins on Tuesday, November 19th, and opens in cinemas on Thursday, November 27th. The festival’s screening of The Ice Tower at 8.15pm on Wednesday, November 20th, will be followed by a Q&A with Lucile Hadzihalilovic; the film-maker will take part in a festival masterclass, hosted by Tara Brady, at 1pm on Friday, September 21st
