My Life on Ice

I've really liked some of this duo's films, been unimpressed by others, but this was the only one that seemed like a waste of time and effort. Not that it's bad, exactly, just that there's so little point to it. The gimmick is that the teenage aspiring-figure-skater protagonist (played by an actual teenage aspiring figure skater) is given a vidcam for his birthday, then proceeds to film everything and everyone around him. Which is exactly as boring as that sounds.

This movie ends up in that "found footage" trap where the content has to be psuedo-random and mostly uneventful enough to sustain the illusion of being "real," yet professional actors are used, so that illusion is never convincing-we're obviously watching performers pretending to be "awkward" and "natural" on camera. The lead Etienne is OK but not very interesting or charismatic; his best friend is a bit more appealing. This is supposedly a "coming out" story, but despite our hero proclaiming early on that this is the year he will lose his virginity, nothing happens on that front-not even flirting-until the very end. Indeed, the only thing that really "happens" is that the lead annoys everyone by insistently filming everyone all the time, even when they explicitly ask him not to. It's a miracle his best friend tolerates this as long as he does.

This is just one more proof that unless you have a very, very good reason for using the "found footage" gimmick (as in, say, the "Paranormal Activity" series), it's better to simply do a conventionally scripted and shot narrative. Better for viewers, at least. Or in this case, it might also have been possible/better to do a documentary about the lead's real life. Landing somewhere in between, "My Life on Ice" isn't as shapeless as watching someone else's home movies, but it's still pretty tedious as fictional entertainment. Unless you find the lead particularly attractive or relatable, there's nothing much to hold attention. Within its chosen limitations it's a decently-crafted movie, but a failed experiment that doesn't reward the effort it took to make it-or that it takes to watch it.

Some critics say this movie isn't dealing about anything. That's true. It just deals about a 16 year old ice skater who gets a videocamera and films his life over one year. He's preparing for an ice skating championship, his best friend wants to be an actor is is having one girlfriend after the other, his history professor is starting a relationship with his mother and he comes to terms with being gay. That's not revolutionary, no. But it's nice. I guess the critics who did not like this movie, were not charmed by the debuting actor Jimmy Tavares who is great. (he's a real ice skating champion and gives a daring performance). He will remind people of Jamie Bell in Billy Elliott. Maybe the two can star together in a movie! If you liked Drole De Felix and Billy Elliott, you'll like this one as well.

That's the kind of movie that makes you leave the room with a nice feeling that the world is beautiful and everyone is in peace. The best scene though is when Etienne's stepfather starts doing a strip tease for him. Great! Pity it lasts only a few seconds as the latter changes his mind. By the way, the school teacher becomes boyfriend of Etienne's mum, after the boy is reprimanded at school. At least that is how I understood, but I got a bit confused when I read the previous user's comment.

I immediately liked this movie simply because our hero is very handsome and poetic, and his best friend is even more handsome, but I wondered how the movie, all supposedly filmed by our hero and those in his milieu, would fill an hour and forty minutes. Have no fear, I was drawn into it and the leisurely pacing simply added to the poetry and visual beauty of the scenes.

It's a lot like the movie "Garcon Stupide" in its cinéma-vérité feel, but the simple, straightforward journey of one year in this boy's life makes for a more cohesive movie, I think.

The grandmother is reminiscent of Gena Rowlands. I don't know if that's good or bad, it just is. Most people would say that's good.

I enjoyed the travelogue aspect of the movie, the interesting bits and pieces of Rouen and other places that you're never going to see on the Travel Channel. But the heart of the film is the relationships between the characters, and the way those relationships are ruled by our hero's desires and obsessions.

For most of the film, everything is a matter of suggestion. Our hero is screamingly gay, but only his camera-work screams it out loud. He yearns for his teacher-cum-mother's-boyfriend, who sees this and maybe even likes this a little, but we never see anything come of this on screen, if anything happens at all.

His happiness will probably have to take another form.

I take my comment to be an appendix to the "portrait by indirection" comment;one question though: isn't his geography teacher exactly like his mother's paramour?

That said, I really enjoyed the ironic clin d'oeil to the nouvelle nouvelle vague territory, when our hero Etienne kicks his best friend Ludo into assuming grins that portray "angst", "happiness", etc, as a promising actor, all in mocking succession; I would even go that far as to claim that it was intended as an irony-a-clef towards Louis Garrel's usual persona! Or the subtlety of turning cinema verite into something else.

And mostly I enjoyed the almost effortless and sudden passage of the triply difficult portrayal of what happens in the end: Etienne surely contemplates suicide when he leaves his camera at the Falaises and stands at the edge - why? Was it the humiliating instance of his 'stepfather' as he calls him, even though and because he desires him, starts to strip, then retracts his - was it an offer, albeit a subconscious one, or the usual unaffected and brutal masculine perplexity facing intimacy? We can certainly hear an edge in Etienne's voice even as he firmly, and perhaps for the first time standing for himself (and his camera), continues filming that lewd scene. Or was it remorse because of the accident?

But quicker than our questions we see a handsome new face staring into Etienne's camera, and filming him without his usual uneasiness when shot by another; a slight, unconvincing protest as he rushes to his new face because, as this, his first lover tells him, in a kind of french idiom, he will change his face after he will have made love, and as they start having fun, Etienne no longer needs his camera, nor do we. The end. After all the straining footage of his, finally, not-so-true life in Rouen, we just see something flickering past us: no more who this guy is, or what he does just to keep the empty suspense go on, but we pass to something secretive that we don't witness, his true life in Rouen! That, for me, keeps this film from turning into a trick: it remains true as a portrait where the line between what is spontaneous and what is premeditated remains blurred, as perhaps in adolescence and its seemingly eternal waiting of the real life to begin. Just where we thought real life means action, well, it just is a secret.