The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
Jeanne, the motherless adolescent in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower (2025), has fallen in love with an idea. Stuck in an alpine foster home, where the palette of burnt-toast brown and porridgy beige binds this film loosely to the 1970s, Jeanne is in bed, studying the picture of an ice rink on an old, well-thumbed postcard under torchlight. (It is one of multiple images like this: Clara Pacini, the newcomer who plays Jeanne, illuminated amid darkness and looking with silent determination.) She has been reading Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” to another orphaned girl, transporting them from dull surroundings to an immense sovereign realm made from diamond-hard ice. Hadžihalilović limns the reading experience onscreen in wondrous blues, scored by the theremin-like tones of an ondes Martenots playing Olivier Messiaen’s mesmeric suite “Fête des belles eaux.” One might imagine that the tale, read over and over again, has penetrated Jeanne’s soft, suggestible young mind like a jagged shard of glass. One might imagine that now even an allusion to ice carries echoes, for Jeanne, of independence and escape.
That Jeanne is an orphan will come as little surprise to those familiar with Hadžihalilović’s films. (Hadžihalilović’s fixation on parentless worlds is what I like most about her work: She makes next to no concession to the sensible grown-up gaze, frolicking in an imaginary untouched by the cold, sobering light of day.) Yet while the petite ballerinas in Innocence (2004) and the lonely, toothless girl in Earwig (2021) are immured in antechambers to adulthood with their surrogate guardians for most of each film, Jeanne more quickly finds a way out. She absconds from the orphanage without any difficulty, and she is in luck. When the ice rink from the postcard disappoints (not the life-changing portal she had hoped it would be, even if a skater named Bianca dazzles her), she stumbles upon a film set where “The Snow Queen” is being realized: silver sequins, scintillating icicles, and all. Adopting the name Bianca, Jeanne skulks around the set—“ratlike,” in one character’s assessment—and insinuates herself when she sees an opportune moment, casting other girls out where she can. (As in Innocence, Hadžihalilović acutely captures the violence and heartbreak of girls jealously competing for attention, and the transcendent shiver of pleasure that accompanies being recognized and singled out by a beautiful, powerful woman.) Before long, Jeanne as Bianca has scaled the production’s hierarchies to the dressing room of Cristina van den Berg, the star actress playing The Snow Queen.
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
Marion Cotillard crystallizes the twinned aspects of this role perfectly: brisk, impressive spectacle when she is The Snow Queen, and shadowy, melancholic seduction when she is Cristina, the woman behind the star. Hadžihalilović aligns us, however, with the narrow perspective of Jeanne throughout, and Jeanne ignores any clues of tragedy she cannot synthesize; that Cristina is an orphan just like her works with the fantasy; that she could be an addict with a death wish does not. (Jeanne already has one dead mother to remember, after all.) So Jeanne insists: “I love the Snow Queen. I love that she’s immortal.” Cristina counters, “But she’s alone.” Jeanne is quick to dismiss that inconvenient detail: “She has her realm, and it is hers forever.”
Jeanne wants to be in that realm, or better still, to possess it. Hadžihalilović mirrors the extent to which Jeanne is in reach or in control of her icy fantasy by continually playing with scale. One of many visual pleasures in this intricate film is tracing such concertina-like extensions and compressions throughout. In one scene, the realm is diminutive enough that, like a doll’s house, it could fit into a corner of a bedroom. In another, the realm is boundless; terrifyingly, little Jeanne is almost imperceptible within it. Close-ups of hands frequently display Jeanne holding objects she has filched from The Snow Queen, Cristina, and Bianca. Jeanne’s girlish logic of metonymy twinkles in each: Once she has this or that thing (a cigarette end, even, ringed with the red kiss of the smoker’s lipstick), Jeanne might get closer to the person to whom it belonged—then resemble and perhaps become her.
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
This confluence of looking, cinema, and portentous objects put me in mind of feminist theorists of the 1970s. Some among them would have loved this film, in which the male director who mentions Hitchcock (played by Gaspar Noé, being a good sport) is rendered so minor it is almost comical, in which a girl is instead “the bearer of the look,” as Laura Mulvey phrased it in 1975.1 If we, like those psychoanalytic feminist theorists before us, were to put poor motherless Jeanne on the Freudian couch, then we might interpret her fetish objects—blue bead, polygonic crystal—as compensating for maternal lack; her idolization of The Snow Queen as transforming Cristina’s dangerous, threatening lack into reassuring fetish, too.
Hadžihalilović, as one might expect, never puts this so explicitly. Yet “one can project” with The Ice Tower, she says—its snowy expanses and cinema screens, surfaces for delusions and dreams. I spoke with her about adapting Hans Christian Andersen, the place of fetishism in her cinema, and not underestimating girls like Jeanne.
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: I want to start by talking about creating worlds in cinema, and whether particular images in “The Snow Queen” inspired this film adaptation.
LUCILE HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: I started with this feminine figure of The Snow Queen, and what she might represent for a girl like Jeanne: an icy ideal, yet simultaneously a woman who has her own wounds and darknesses. Cinema came after that. There is a broken mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale that distorts the world and dazzles perspective. This could be a metaphor for cinema, I thought. The Snow Queen and cinema each represent an artificial, imaginary world for Jeanne, one more exciting than the real one.
NOTEBOOK: I wonder whether we could linger on the film’s title for a moment: “The Snow Queen” here becomes The Ice Tower. Why that switch? Is it significant?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: Calling it The Snow Queen seemed too obvious, and too precise as well. When Geoff [Cox] and I were writing the script, we had an idea of an ice tower first being dreamed, then appearing on the film set, then in the world: moving from abstraction to physical reality. So while The Snow Queen is a bit literal, with The Ice Tower one can project: Is it the cinema? Is it the actress? Or the whole kingdom? I tried to find another title—for instance, The Aberrant Crystal or The Wrong Crystal—but in the end it was The Ice Tower.… Though that image appears less than some others, it is, perhaps, interesting like that.
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: I love what you’ve said in interviews about Innocence being a film for girls aged eight to ten, and that little girls often understand it more than adults. For The Ice Tower, was there an ideal spectator you had in mind?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: I suppose this is an adolescent film, less for children than Innocence. But often we are more scared for children than they are themselves scared. What we fear, they frequently find exciting and challenging. What we interpret, they see directly and plainly.
NOTEBOOK: It is incredible to me how attuned to young girls’ sensibilities you are all across your work. How do you stay so in touch with girlhood into adulthood?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: I lived in Casablanca as a girl. There were many cinemas, but it was not somewhere I felt free. Maybe all of that affected me, my imagination—and it could be I never totally grew up. With my film Earwig, when I tried to imagine the perspective of an adult man, even he was a bit like a child. This may be why I am interested in fairy tales: They give me freedom of perspective and access to the unconscious.
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: I want to talk about the smallest objects in this film, each of those talismanic props that link Jeanne to Rose, Bianca, and Cristina. You have a way with things: crystalline glasses in Earwig, starfish and coral in Evolution [2015], colored ribbons in Innocence. Could you talk about this sort of magpie fascination with objects?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: Atmosphere attracts me to cinema, as do those details. I like playing with physical objects like the bead and the crystal in this film, and fairy tales allow me to use these sorts of things. I am attracted to things; I think, yes, my films are probably very fetishistic. [Laughs.] Sometimes that fetish can be a color rather than…a lamp, say; something tangible. Maybe I ultimately make films because I want to create a little universe where I can live with my fetish, and I want to invite other people to share in it.
NOTEBOOK: Staying with that fetishism briefly…I love the scene in which Jeanne discovers the costume closet. If you could pick your favorite costume, which would it be?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: I love the gradual evolution of Jeanne’s costumes. I was not into fashion as an adolescent. I was wearing the sorts of clothes Jeanne wears right at the beginning of the film: a red jacket and ugly trousers. But really it is the queen’s costume, of course…and we were thinking of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo for how The Snow Queen would look.
NOTEBOOK: I can see those inspirations! I am also interested to know how you went about casting Clara Pacini. She is excellent at bringing out Jeanne’s obsessive qualities. Were you looking for any specific traits during casting?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: I wanted someone daring, and someone able to telegraph Jeanne’s inner life. I didn’t realize the strength Jeanne could have until meeting Clara. When she came along for casting, she looked very young—younger than she is. She has a graceful face, and yet there is a strength to her silhouette too. You say “obsessive,” which is also interesting; the way Clara often looks at things is almost violent, or at least very intense. Geoff and I were thinking about the girl’s emotions when we were writing, and we knew how Jeanne looks at things would be important. Clara’s casting confirmed that this film could be about that: about seeing things, looking at things.
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: When Marion Cotillard has spoken about working with Clara, she sounds genuinely fearful—reckoning with the asymmetry of fame, power, youth; with the knowledge of what they have to perform. I know she also asked to have an intimacy coordinator. What was Marion and Clara’s dynamic like to your eyes? Did it evolve during shooting?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: Yes, Marion felt cautious about working with Clara. She was generous toward her—helpful and delicate too. Yet she felt cautious about the violence. We asked if she wanted to have an intimacy coordinator, which is comparatively new in France, and she thought it a good idea, and a good thing that it had become more normal. Before Marion and Clara met, the intimacy coordinator and I spoke with Clara about the violent scene of the kiss, asking her how she would feel confident doing it, where she felt comfortable being touched. When Marion and Clara eventually met, Marion felt reassured: Clara was neither fragile, nor was she shy.
We knew each other well when we filmed that scene in the final days of shooting together, and managed to do it without losing how emotional the scene is. It wasn’t difficult. It was, in fact, a bit funny: Clara wasn’t actually afraid of much but hurting Marion. She does judo. She was scared of pushing with too much force. (I think she has a black belt, or something similar.) But I suppose we were all a little nervous about that scene, because that weird vampiric kiss somehow had to happen, and happen for real.
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: What you say about Clara resonates with your other films for me: Never underestimate curious girls. Speaking of being curious, you’re hosting The Liberated Film Club at Close-Up tomorrow, is that right?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: It will be fun! I haven’t ever been to this ciné-club. I look forward to presenting what I have chosen.
NOTEBOOK: Might I ask what the film is?
HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: No, I’m not supposed to tell anyone.… I can’t spoil the mystery.
[Author’s note: Hadžihalilović had chosen The Creature (1977). In Eloy de la Iglesia’s bestial, daring film, a black dog goes from bad, barking omen of a bourgeois housewife’s miscarriage to stand-in child to replacement lover—becoming, for this particular housewife, reassuring rather than dangerous, and behaving like a good fetish object, a very good boy.]
- Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 11. ↩