Ice Storm
(Ice Storm)

Here, Ang Lee breaks away from the restraint of his earlier films to reach a state of icy lucidity. The family drama becomes a moral X-ray, and beneath the snow of early-1970s Connecticut, the certainties of a prosperous America are silently buried. Behind the well-kept façades lies an emptiness — that left by exhausted utopias, stifled desires, and families undone by their own comfort. Nothing seems to break through; on the contrary, each shot appears to hold back the very coldness it depicts. Families unravel under the weight of a freedom turned injunction, and individual desires collide with the void of a progress stripped of meaning. The irony of the title takes on an almost metaphysical dimension. This cold spell is not meteorological but moral — an inner frost made tragically visible. Jérôme Baron

SÉANCES