An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film; it is a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission. It wittily fuses the real and the fictional into a trance-state – and that’s the state that I’ve sometimes found a little static in previous films by Lucile Hadžihalilović, but not here. Dreamily strange it might be (and in fact, on the face of it, entirely preposterous) this movie had me gripped with its two outstanding lead performances – from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini – and a clamorous musical score.
Cotillard plays a diva-ish movie actor called Cristina, who is the lead in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen being filmed on a soundstage which is in a remote and snowy spot in late 60s France; she is gorgeously costumed in a sparkling white form-fitting gown and crown, a look she carries off with great unsmiling hauteur. Pacini plays Jeanne, a teenage girl in a foster home nearby, stricken with memories of the death of her mother, whose bead necklace she keeps. In her loneliness and grief, Jeanne has projected her feelings into an obsession with the story of the Snow Queen, an obsession further displaced at another remove into idolising the teen girls who ice-skate at the local rink. One day she runs away, stealing the ID of an older girl called Bianca and breaks into the film studio to sleep overnight; she somehow gets a job as an extra, astonished to realise what story is being filmed, and it is here that her gamine prettiness and air of demurely sensitive adoration for the queen catches Cristina’s eye.
