Dir: Sebastien Betbeder | Cast; Blanche Gardin, Philippe Katerine, Bastien Bouillon, Martin Jensen | France, Drama 111′
A ciggy is a great way to start the day for Coline. Especially in the fresh air of the Jura mountains where this woman with a mission fetches up in Sebastien Betbeder’s crisis drama screening in this year’s Panorama strand at Berlinale.
There’s nowhere better to ‘find yourself’ amid all that snow and empty space, after everything has fallen apart. Well that’s the plan for Coline Morel (talented actor and comedian Blanche Gardin).
Judging from phone calls, there’s obviously been a bust-up between Coline and Sasha, the person she’s left behind. Shacking up with her brother Basile (Katerine), in the family chalet, she makes a start on her writing project with some deplacement activity: watching home movies of the holidays enjoyed with their (late) father, who suffered from chronic depression.
Spying her ex, Christophe, a teacher, Coline rushes out into the snow. In the awkward silence that follows their brief greeting, she offers to give en ecological talk to his class on the following morning. Mis-judging the mood and the age group her diatribe is entirely inappropriate. Too young to understand or even care, the tiny children are shocked and disturbed by Coline’s vehement attitude. And so is Christophe when she attempts an impromptu snog afterwards. Judging from these darkly humorous episodes, Coline has lost the plot, but it’s only later, when the action moves to Greenland, that we discover why.
Billed as a comedy, this is certainly no romcom but a drama of humanistic proportions that is relatable and deeply affecting in the final stretch. Betbeder is an award-winning director whose latest heroine very much brings to mind Albert Dupontel’s character in Love Me No More (Deux Jours a Tuer). More tragedy than comedy as it plays out The Incredible Snowwoman gradually descends into nihilistic territory occasionally brightened by incidents of human warmth when Coline’s negativity threatens to poison and submerge everyone in her orbit, not least her brothers, Basile and Lolo, who have spent their life dominated by her overbearing personality which nevertheless gives the film its emotional freight.
The bedraggled Basile has clearly taken refuge from the rest of the family in the Jura chalet. He runs the village bar La Derniere Piste, where locals congregate, and invites his sister there later for some light relief, on both sides. Afterwards, inebriated, she goes round to Christophe’s house where mayhem ensues when Coline tries to set the record straight with him and his partner, an old schoolfriend.
Clearly Coline is troubled but there is a darkly endearing side to her character and one that draws the brothers to her at her time of need, as the three embark on a daredevil trip to seek refuge in their father’s former hideaway, high up in the snow-capped yonder. The next morning Coline goes missing, feared dead, and the mystery of her whereabouts unfolds in the film’s final devastating act. Gardin holds it all together with conviction in this latest Greenland set drama, a follow-up to Betbeder’s 2014 feature Inupiluk @MeredithTaylor
BERLINALE 2025 | PANORAMA 2025