It’s hard to know how to react to White as Snow, which presents itself on one level as an earnest character study of a young woman discovering her capacity for desire, and on another level as a deeply goofy pastiche of a time-worn fairy tale. Ultimately, the movie feels like a parody of both of those things, at once as spirited as a French New Wave lark and as insubstantial as a puff of cotton candy.
Director Anne Fontaine, collaborating on the script with Claire Barré and Pascal Bonitzer, keeps the allegory under wraps for most of the first act, with a few hints sprinkled in, but it doesn’t take much longer until the machinery of the plot reveals what’s really going on. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal the twist suggested by the title, but there is a certain pleasure that comes with discovering it organically, so this review aspires to tread lightly on that ground. Suffice to say that the film starts out with a certain amount of gravitas thanks to the involvement of Isabelle Huppert, a legend of French cinema as respected for her dramatic chops as for her enduring sex appeal. She exudes mystery and menace as Maud, the imperious step-mother of the seemingly innocent Claire (Lou de Laâge), who works in her late father’s high-class hotel in a picturesque Geneva.
Claire has the smoldering regard and bee-stung lips of a stereotypical French ingénue, attracting the attention of Maud’s new boyfriend (Charles Berling). With startling swiftness, Claire is kidnapped, stuffed in a trunk and driven deep into the French Alps, where several improbable twists result in her being rescued by a trio of gentlemen bachelors in a secluded house deep in the woods. Yves Angelo’s lush cinematography lends the film a sense of polish and artistry as the story unfolds in some truly dazzling locations, but the increasingly silly story begins to tug the film in another direction. Cavorting in the nearby village after escaping her kidnappers, Claire interacts with a procession of strange men, including a horny bookstore owner (Benoît Poelvoorde), an angry veterinarian (Jonathan Cohen), a bashful farmer (Damien Bonnard), and a dumb athlete (Pablo Pauly), each of whom could be reduced to a single adjective describing their personality.
While the actual Brothers Grimm share story credits, White as Snow doesn’t give the family-friendly Disney treatment to the classic tale, but rather injects it with all the sex and philosophizing that one might expect from international French cinema. Claire gets naked again and again, ravishing several of her male suitors as she awakens to her newfound sense of desire, dormant since the untimely death of her parents. Ultimately, it’s Claire’s perplexing behavior which gives the game away. Her character arc becomes less about self-actualization and more about putting herself willfully in danger, as if doing so might summon a rescuing prince.
Once Maud shows up again, plunging a syringe full of poison into a rosy red apple, you know the jig is just about up. The allegorical signposts present themselves in a steady procession right up until the final scene, and yet an inattentive viewer might not catch on to the fairy tale parallel. Such is the lusciousness of the photography, the evocativeness of the setting and the gorgeous original score by Bruno Coulais. This is a beautifully made film, with performances finely tuned to comic and seductive frequencies, all rendered in the telling of a deeply silly story.
Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group
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