NZIFF Review: The Ice Tower

WEB EXCLUSIVE | REVIEW | NZIFF Written by Trevor Pronoso |  Letterboxd: @CleverGurl | Instagram: @trev.pro | Contributing Writer

The Ice Tower

dir. Lucile Hadžihalilović

France, 145 mins

There's this quote by Terence Davies that immediately popped into my mind halfway through watching The Ice Tower, where he talks about his first time seeing Singin' in the Rain (1952) at the age of seven: "During that scene in the rain, I cried and cried and cried… [My sister] asked, 'Why are you crying?', and I told her, ‘Because he looks so happy!'" It's a memory made bittersweet knowing that his father was physically and psychologically abusive towards him until he died of cancer (his father died around the same year Davies first watched Singin' in the Rain.)

I preface with this quote because Lucile Hadžihalilović understands these contradictory feelings well and channels them through her chosen protagonist: a young foster girl who runs away from home suddenly becomes obsessed with an older actress playing the role of the Ice Queen. I'll leave any psychoanalytic readings to the experts; however, if there's one thing that immediately stands out in The Ice Tower, it would be the constant textural interplay of bodies physically interacting with virtually everything you can see in the frame (i.e. touching objects, populating empty spaces, rays of light illuminating a face). It is through this film's strong sense of corporeality butting heads against the unconscious that one develops a strong, physiological attachment to our young protagonist's negotiations with their desire, be it pain or pleasure.

But if I were to parlay an attempt to understand our protagonist, my preference would lean toward Slavoj Žižek's thoughts on masks: that there is no such thing as an 'authentic' self, and that the social masks we wear for others are where the truth of our personality lies. The truth lies in performance, or at least for Judith Butler, performativity as a disposition is where gender is materialised. The Ice Tower elevates this tension of clarification: what's the difference between 'performance' and 'performativity'?