Yahoo Lifestyle Marion Cotillard and Lucile Hadzihalilovic Salute Actors and Artifice in Fractured Fairy Tale ‘The Ice Tower’
Two decades after their last collaboration, Marion Cotillard reunites with filmmaker Lucile Hadzihalilovic for “The Ice Tower,” a fractured fable that lifts as much from the work of Hans Christian Andersen as from Hadzihalilovic’s formative years.
Premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, the 1970s-set film follows a young orphan who falls into an hypnotic — and soon reciprocated — obsession with a film star shooting an adaptation of Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.”
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“All my films are fairy-tales,” says Hadzihalilovic. “I don’t care to situate my stories in an everyday reality or a contemporary timeframe; whereas the storybook form comes naturally, allowing for poetry and escape.”
Cotillard, of course, plays that regal film star — “a cold, cold woman,” per the director — who doubles as a vision of glamour and a taste of something altogether more acrid. And after working together on 2004’s “Innocence,” Hadzihalilovic now wanted to give her star the chance to play some unfamiliar notes.
“[Marion] can evoke a terrific amount of fear,” says the filmmaker. “Only I have rarely seen her given that kind of role. She exudes something both sensual and distant, connecting a modern way of acting with a face and aura that feels timeless. And she connects me to the kind of cinema I love.”
Indeed, “The Ice Tower” is very much about cinephilia. And if hardly playing in self-portraiture, Hadzihalilovic nevertheless made a point to set this imagistic coming-of-age fable at the precise moment of her own adolescence.
“The world could still be mysterious in the 1970s,” says Hadzihalilovic. “We didn’t have access to the internet, of course, and we don’t show any television or print media in the film — and that was essential in order to believe in the strength and power of actors and images, and the kinds of mysteries they hold.
“The film reflects that intense emotional moment of discovery,” she continues. “[That feeling you get] as a teenager, going to the cinema alone, surrounded by strangers. Only here, the young girl doesn’t have that experience at the cinema but on a film set, which is even better.”
Pursuant to that goal, Hadzihalilovic and D.P Jonathan Ricquebourg (“The Taste of Things”) aimed for a mise-en-scène so meticulous that each shot was almost fetishistic about aestheticizing artifice; and unlike most projects about the magic of moviemaking, here that otherworldly glow also bathed the soundstage corridors and sets-in-construction.
“We thought a lot about [Victor Erice’s] ‘The Spirit of the Beehive,’ which transfigures reality through the eyes of a youth,” the director explains. “And we tried to do the same — embellishing and stylizing, experiencing this world through the young girl’s eyes by making the mundane a bit more enchanted.”
Eagle-eyed viewers might even notice one familiar face made all-but-unrecognizable, with Hadzihalilovic’s longtime collaborator Gaspar Noé playing the film-within-a-film’s beleaguered helmer.
“I thought it funny to cast Gaspar as a director completely unlike himself,” she laughs. “But it was his idea to wear a wig. That was his one condition. I asked him [to play in the film], and he said if he could wear a wig he’d do it for free!”
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