COMING IN FROM THE COLD

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Smilla's Sense of Snow is more than a climatological instinct. It is the projection of a wintry soul over which a long, cold arctic night settled long ago.

When we meet her in director Bille August's intricate and compelling realization of Peter Hoeg's best-selling novel, Smilla Jaspersen has given her professional life over to the frozen music of mathematics, her private life over to bone-chilling isolation. The set of Smilla's face, the carriage of her body, as Julia Ormond plays her, says, "Don't ask, don't touch." She relents--angry at the show of weakness--for just one person. That is a lonely little boy named Isaiah, who lives in her apartment building.

Her identification with the child is more than that of one solitary with another. He was born in Greenland, as she was. Both of his parents are Inuits, natives of the region, as her mother was. Both have lost parents at an early age. And now, like Smilla before him, the boy finds himself trying to make a new life in Copenhagen, which to them is hardly the Danny Kaye song's "friendly old girl of a town." August makes us see it as dark and claustrophobic, stressing its contrast to the bright and limitless horizons of the land, essentially untouched by modern civilization, where they were born.

One day Smilla comes home from work and finds Isaiah dead, the victim of a fall from their building's rooftop. An accident, the police insist. A murder, her intuition tells her. This suspicion is confirmed by the increasingly hostile behavior of the authorities as she begins to investigate the case. It will come as no surprise to devotees of the paranoid thriller--is there any other kind nowadays?--that the victim is accidentally privy to information that threatens the secret plans of a powerful mining corporation to exploit and sully Greenland's purity. It will come as no surprise to them either that as the conspiracy surrounding Smilla begins to take form, the movie loses some of its superbly shadowed sense of menace.

What will surprise everyone is the dry iciness, the burning coldness of Ormond's Smilla. Up to now she has trafficked largely in vulnerability--melting in Legends of the Fall, perhaps a shade too winsome in Sabrina. Here, she is all contained fury, except for the flashes of anger and contempt that burst without warning from the darkness within. It's not exactly diva acting such as we used to get from the great ladies of the movies' classic era. She achieves her effects with less obvious calculation. But like a Barbara Stanwyck or a Bette Davis, she takes us into that country where strength shades into neurosis, and we fear that she can never be reclaimed for the more orderly pleasures of ordinary life.

It is Gabriel Byrne's duty as an enigmatically watchful neighbor-lover-ally patiently to offer her that option, and he does it with his customary brooding grace. It's the duty of a lot of good character actors to keep driving her in the opposite direction, toward the end of her very taut tether. It is the very great pleasure of this movie (well written by Ann Biderman) that its truly haunting suspense derives not from Smilla's conflict with her external enemies but from her own demons.

--By Richard Schickel