La Tour de glace (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025)

[Red Screamer]

La tour de glace (Lucile Hadžihalilović) is great. It’s a simple, lonely fairy tale, at its core more elemental than meta, though both approaches get eventually folded in together. There’s not much meaningful dialogue, since this is a film of ambiance, mystery, and the visual play of restriction or expansion of spaces — which is partially to say that it’s a story of curiosity butting its head against experience with the audience plunged into the wide-eyed guilelessness of its protagonist, and partially to say that if you’re not on its wavelength, you might not get a lot out of it. But I, for one, was enthralled by its sleek, controlled style and unfolding of motifs. For example, the ice/snow central to the film’s visual palette gets associated variously with windows, crystals, children’s games, drugs, dust, tears, and the freezing process at the heart of a cold medium like cinema. Its dreaminess and use of Cotillard have a faint residue of Rivette, which brought to mind the piece where Rosenbaum wrote that Duelle is a literalization of the metaphor of movie stars as goddesses. One could revise that for La tour de glace to say it’s a literalization of the metaphor of movie stars as royalty, with all of the despotism, fascination, loneliness, distance, and airheadedness that it implies.

Spoiler

Did anyone else think the “incredible thing” Cotillard shows the protagonist toward the end looked eerily like the Paramount logo — “the studio with all the stars”? Or maybe I’m just still a bit in dreamland.

[dadaistnun]

I loved this, too, though I’m struggling to remember what you reference in the spoiler. I’ve been wanting to watch it again anyway, but at this point I’ll probably just wait for the disc, presuming Yellow Veil does one. It’s probably too late given the film is already streaming, but dear god would I love to see this in a theater.

Great use of Messiaen’s ondes martenot music, which provides a bit of aural kinship to Earwig.

La tour de glace (Lucile Hadžihalilović) is great. It’s a simple, lonely fairy tale, at its core more elemental than meta, though both approaches get eventually folded in together. There’s not much meaningful dialogue, since this is a film of ambiance, mystery, and the visual play of restriction or expansion of spaces — which is partially to say that it’s a story of curiosity butting its head against experience with the audience plunged into the wide-eyed guilelessness of its protagonist, and partially to say that if you’re not on its wavelength, you might not get a lot out of it. But I, for one, was enthralled by its sleek, controlled style and unfolding of motifs. For example, the ice/snow central to the film’s visual palette gets associated variously with windows, crystals, children’s games, drugs, dust, tears, and the freezing process at the heart of a cold medium like cinema. Its dreaminess and use of Cotillard have a faint residue of Rivette, which brought to mind the piece where Rosenbaum wrote that Duelle is a literalization of the metaphor of movie stars as goddesses. One could revise that for La tour de glace to say it’s a literalization of the metaphor of movie stars as royalty, with all of the despotism, fascination, loneliness, distance, and airheadedness that it implies.

Spoiler

Did anyone else think the “incredible thing” Cotillard shows the protagonist toward the end looked eerily like the Paramount logo — “the studio with all the stars”? Or maybe I’m just still a bit in dreamland.

[therewillbeblus]

La tour de glace (Lucile Hadžihalilović)

Spoiler

Did anyone else think the “incredible thing” Cotillard shows the protagonist toward the end looked eerily like the Paramount logo — “the studio with all the stars”? Or maybe I’m just still a bit in dreamland.

Spoiler

It certainly could have been (at least as a double meaning), but it looked like just a mountain to me. I took it more as building on the motif of ice as this lonely but alluring thing - to see an entire mountain of it helped connect them by sharing in that loneliness on a grander scale. Like deepening a bond by getting as vulnerable as possible.. in step with the promise made to "be joined forever"