A film by Lucile Hadžihalilović
With: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Gaspar Noé, Marine Gesbert, Lila-Rose Gilberti, Raphael Reboul, Carmen Haidacher, Wilhelm Bonnelle, Dounia Sichov
1970s. From her high mountain village, 15-year-old Jeanne dreams of leaving her childhood orphanage and discovering the world. Fleeing to the city of lights, she finds refuge in a shed. In the morning, the Snow Queen appears to her, dazzling. The shed turns out to be a studio where a film adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Snow Queen, is being shot. Cristina, the star, who embodies the Queen, reigns supreme on the set. Fascinated by this cruel woman with a disturbing charm, both powerful and vulnerable, Jeanne becomes her protege and her confidante as the trap closes in on her.
Our rate: ***
It’s a highly successful exercise in style, appropriating an Andersen-style tale and giving it a fascinating texture, precisely to evoke, with tact and elegance, the subject of the hold and fascination that young girls can have for characters like the Snow Queen, or for actresses. The duo of Marion Cotillard and Clara Pacini works to perfection, creating an obvious mirror effect, and what’s more, Lucille Hadzihalilovic has the luxury of moving the wintry tale into the very making of cinema, going so far as to reveal her tricks of the trade. We’re drawn in, precisely because the aesthetics and ingredients of fairy tales take us back to the fascination we might have had as children for these stories, for their formative qualities, for what they say about life and death, for their philosophical implications that go far beyond mere fright. A great success, then, probably for ages 7 to 77, even if the morbid or bloody elements (small, highly stylized touches) are enough to feed a few nightmares, even if the insertion of reality into the tale, the distancing, can sometimes pull us out of it.
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