The Ice Tower · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Hadžihalilović's The Ice Tower is organized around a crystal-image of exceptional purity: on a 1970s soundstage, the Snow Queen fairy tale is being filmed, and its star Cristina (Marion Cotillard) is simultaneously an actress playing a queen and the queen herself — actual and virtual collapsed into one another until Jeanne's fascination becomes genuinely ontological, unable to locate the seam. This doubling is the film's structural spine, not its ornament. When Jonathan Ricquebourg's camera finds Cotillard's face emerging from chiaroscuro darkness — his characteristically measured, often static framings letting the face materialize from the light rather than be lit — the image achieves a second register: the affection-image at its most severe, a close-up stripped of psychological context and causal motive, radiating something between magnetism and threat before any plot mechanics can contain it. Cotillard's features become a pure quality — desire-and-death at once, maternal warmth fused with glacial negation — and the film refuses to resolve that ambiguity into character psychology. Jeanne herself remains constitutively passive throughout, a time-image protagonist in the strict Deleuzian sense: she does not scheme, pursue, or escape so much as witness, moving through elliptically rationed scenes as a pure seer for whom the studio world registers as optical situation rather than field of action. The debt to Jean Cocteau is precise — as in La Belle et la Bête, the enchanted space is entered through fascination rather than adventure, and the slow camera glide grants the fairy-tale threshold not magic but a cold, devouring glamour.