La tour de glace

There are three threads to this drama, but sadly none of them are really very engaging as it veers away from what could have been quite an intriguing fantasy and heads more into melodrama territory. Firstly, we have “Jeanne” (Clara Pacini). An upset orphan, she has only recently fled her home and just happens to stumble upon a film production of “The Snow Queen” that is being headlined by the temperamental “Cristina” (Marion Cotillard). Now “Cristina” is not a woman with her problems to seek either, and with the third strand illustrating just how the film is being made, we are presented with a slow, dimly lit and really quite lacklustre combination of themes that never quite sparkles. To be fair to Cotillard, she does exude a certain frostiness that the photography does well to support, but as the two women’s characters start to intertwine more, that darkness, eeriness and coldness becomes subsumed in something altogether more tame. I’m sure one of it’s purposes is to blur the realities for both women - and thereby for us, too, and as it progresses we see the fascinated young “Jeanne/Bianca" become even more immersed in a fairy story than we know she was when she first arrived, but I didn’t feel there to be very much substance or electricity in their rapidly arrived at relationship. The film is atmospheric but that’s not really anything to do with either of them either, nor their sparsely delivered dialogue. For me, it was because I already knew how unforgiving and demanding Anderson’s original “Snow Queen” was and so Cotillard needn’t do so much of her own heavy lifting. I don’t know, perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood, but I was really quite disappointed with this.