The movie "The Ice Tower" is as cold as its setting or indeed any of its characters. Lucile Hadzihalilovic's painfully slow tale of obsession is the kind of European art-movie that gives art-movies a bad name. Jeanne, (Clara Pacini), is the young girl who runs away from home and stumbles on the set of a film version of "The Snow Queen", (a book that, coincidentally, she happens to be hooked on). Adopting someone else's identity she gets a job as an extra on the film and then develops something of a crush on the actress playing The Snow Queen, (Marion Cotillard at her most glacial), a crush the actress reciprocates in her strange and demanding way.
This, however, is no "All About Eve" and Jeanne dosen't have the wherewith all to be much of a schemer. Rather she's a young girl in love with an ideal and a diva incapable of returning her love and, as the song says, 'unrequited love's a bore'. About the midway point it would seem that Jeanne's fantasies and the film she's appearing in become intertwined just as we kind of guessed they might, (films like "The Ice Tower" are very easy to read), but by then I had given up the ghost. Others, however, have found it to be the veritable bee's knees and "The Ice Tower" has been figuring in many end-of-year best film lists. All I can say is, for those who like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing they like.
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