My Life on Ice

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.

The central conceit of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Ma vraie vie à Rouen (2002, shown in London as Ma Vie) is that everything we see in it is shot on a digital video camera by Étienne, a sixteen-year-old lycée student and budding skating champion who lives with his widowed mother in Rouen. Étienne films everything he likes with his camera, beginning with his mom (Ariane Ascaride of La ville est tranquille), his grandma (Hélene Surgère), and his best pal, Ludo (Lucas Bonnifait). He even films himself his mom and her boyfriend watching TV. It's startling to see when he leaves the camera on, or has someone else use it at practice in a large skating rink, that he really is a potentially world class skater (the young actor, Jimmy Tavares is a real life skating champion )-- this gives one a sense of authenticity: Étienne is what he's supposed to be. There is an element of trompe-l'oeil in any fake artefact and Ma Vie's is very accomplished.

There's a constant soundtrack picked up by Étienne 's camera but there's no explanatory voiceover narration in Ma Vie. It's a quite convincing imitation of what home videos are like. People are constantly saying "J'arrive pas!" ("I can't do this!") to declare that they've become too self conscious to act natural before the camera. Étienne's mother, whom he adores, gets tired of being filmed all the time and says he will have to get her permission before shooting in future or she will "confiscate" the camera.

The handsome Ludo is a boy who, like the hero of Téchiné's J'embrasse pas (I Don't Kiss, 1991) wants to become an actor without having even the ability to memorize lines. Ludo reports to Étienne (and the camera) on a succession of girlfriends, but admits he hasn't gone all the way with any of them. Étienne has no girlfriends at all, but declares boldly that this will be his "année d'amour"--the year he's going to -- what? Get laid? Fall in love? Come out? It's hard not to suspect that Étienne is gay. He keeps surreptitiously filming his attractive (male) geography teacher, when not focusing on Ludo or his mom's boyfriend (also a lycée prof), and when Ludo grabs the camera and shoots a new female interest in class Étienne gets quite annoyed and says, "Hey, that's MY camera!"

Home video is an inarticulate, needless to say amateurish, medium, and Ma Vie progresses in the true home video style, awkwardly, constantly jerking forward with no logic than chronology to the next shot. As a self-conscious artifice, the film communicates by what it doesn't say, by what isn't there. The very fact that Étienne uses the camera so obsessively suggests that despite being a terrific athlete and having an affectionate little family and a nice best friend, he hasn't yet got much of a life. By pointing the camera out all the time he's both searching for himself and seeking to fill an inner void. Gradually hints of male-oriented sexuality creep out. He relentlessly shoots a male fellow skater undressing in the locker room. He shoots himself naked, and parts of his body, withdrawing into himself when his mother forbids him to film her any more. He focuses on her boyfriend so much that the boyfriend realizes he turns Étienne on, and, being a little drunk, provocatively threatens to undress. Commenting on an unsuccessful acting performance by Ludo , Étienne has revealingly declared to him, `But you looked good. You're handsome. You're really handsome!'

Ludo gets ditched by his best girl because Étienne's filming bothered her so much and seemed so unnatural. This aspect suggests burgeoning sexuality; but it never seems creepy that Étienne is so obsessive as a cameramen, because overall he always remains such a cheerful, healthy guy: he's just unformed and aggressively needy. Finally Étienne competes for the youth French Cup in figure skating and, because of a slip, gets second place. He has belatedly discovered a device that allows him to switch his camera on and off with a remote unit and he shoots himself and Ludo side by side and says, `Two losers.'

The inevitable tentative coming-out-to-the-best-friend conversation occurs in which Étienne asks Ludo, `Do you think a boy can love a boy?' Ludo says, `Only if he's a 'pédé [homo] he can,' but he flees from further declarations by Étienne.

On holiday in Brittany, Étienne has a footrace with his mom's boyfriend and after they have a scuffle the boyfriend falls on the rocks and breaks his leg. The attempt to displace the boyfriend is very oedipal - except that Étienne desires the boyfriend too.

There is also a classic home movie moment when Étienne's mom blows out the candles on her birthday cake, which they've put `all the candles' on, showing her actual age. Étienne shoots this moment over and over with new candles, showing that this isn't quite just a home video and has become an effort to stage his life or alter it and indeed to make his dreams and wishes come true as well as his mother's, especially perhaps the desire to erase the discrepancy between his and his mother's age.

Ma vraie vie à Rouen is the portrait of a waiting process. In a sense all the filming is stalling for time until that moment when Étienne's promise, that this will be his "année d'amour," suddenly, unexpectedly, perhaps inexplicable, comes true. The readiness is all. The camera creates a stage on which the major action is about to begin. There is suspense from shot to shot as one waits for that decisive moment to arrive.

And finally it does in a very short scene where Étienne is in a tent letting the camera shoot his seduction by another young man. It's the moment the whole film has been hinting at, but it's gone in an instant, and the film ends.

Ma vraie vie à Rouen isn't very memorable unless, like Gus van Sant's Gerry, you as the viewer bring to it the maximum attention and sympathy. This film is far more risky and experimental than Ducastel and Martineau's entertaining earlier narrative of a young gay HIV positive man's journey to find his father, Drôle de Félix (Adventures of Felix, 2000), yet it is pleasing and beautiful in its own way. The filmmakers have processed their digital video to give it a deep, vivid color and a smooth, handsome look, a little like early Polaroid snapshots. The film is as empty and unformed as its main character, but like him it is also fully of energy and a curious repressed dramatic tension. This is Étienne's film: he shoots most of it, and by watching how he shoots it, we learn by indirection who he is. Ma vraie vie à Rouen is a minimalist piece. But like any actual home video, it's rich in personal meaning. It's sweet, touching, and human if seen with a friendly eye, and in it Ducastel and Martineau have devised a subtle, fresh way of doing a gay coming of age film.

Etienne a sixteen year old teenager lives with his widowed mother in Rouen. For his birthday, his grand-mother gives him something that will completely change his life: a video camera. From then onwards, he begins to film everyone around him (his mother, his grand-mother, his best pal, Ludovic his history and geography teacher) alternately with important events that happen to him in the beginning of the year 2002: his training in figure skating for the final, the transition at the Euro or the upheaval caused by the first results of the presidential elections with Jacques Chirac against the FN leader Jean Marie Le Pen...

They gave vigor to the musical again with "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" (1998), they gave a new lease of life for the road movie in "the Adventures of Felix" (2000). The couple OLivier Ducastel-Jacques Martineau (behind the camera as well as in life) scores and signs with this particular exercise of style which brings the cinema to its basic roots which consist in pure filming. Indeed, all the movie is made through Etienne's camera and handled by a non-professional actor. A little like in "the Blair Witch Project" (1999), it takes a little time to get used to the incessant movements of the camera but once you overcame this difficulty, one can without any risk immerse oneself in the video made by Etienne and discover his (true) life in Rouen on account of the two director's intentions.

The camera gives Etienne a meaning to his life, a reason to live and it enables him to better understand the world that surrounds him. Moreover, Etienne is a teenager and adolescence is a difficult time because it's a transition between childhood and adulthood and in a way, the camera is here to reassure him, to make him gain self-confidence. By handling it, he feels safe enough to film a time of his life in bloom: a will to find true love (this year will be the year of love), curiosity about his body (he films parts of it) and affirmations of his passions (video, figure skating). On another extent, with his camera Etienne makes all the people he films go through all the possible reactions: from amusement to irritation through embarrassment (on these moments, it's nearly voyeurism) and his treasure has a real power on the filmed people because they often ask Etienne to stop filming them but without success (the sequence when Ariane Ascaride threatens his son to confiscate his camera but ends up giving it up is a good example).

By describing a delicate portrait of their young main character, by directing him according to their indications, the 2 real authors of this flick still remain faithful to their favorite topic: search for happiness. Something which affects the spectator too and with "my true life on ice in Rouen", they have succeeded once again in fulfilling their pledges: to make the spectator happy during all the film and we leave the projection with a big smile.

That said, one can have a few reservations about their third movie: not all the clichés linked to adolescence have been evacuated and the amateurish side of the whole may sometimes tire. Then, it seems a nit unlikely to me that Etienne's history-geography teacher can live with his mother. It's also a shame that the screenplay is often repetitive (the characters who express their annoyance when Etienne constantly films them). In a way, this last fault is nearly normal. The film-makers couldn't avoid him.

But overall it would be out of place to deny oneself at the vision of this delicate and sensitive movie with nearly a documentary aspect which isn't to be ranked in the same line as the terrible "Benny's video" (1992) by Michael Haneke. And for the film-makers, it is a faultless beginning of career so far. Let's hope it lasts.

Remark: "my True Life on Ice in Rouen" was shot in the city where I live: Rouen! So, it was funny to see familiar places in a movie.

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.

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.