Ma vraie vie à Rouen (2002) Reviews

• Portrait by indirection

  Chris Knipp2003-08-14

  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.

• an adolescent indulgence

  hutuanga2006-07-20

  This is a coming of age story about a young gay man who likes to film people with is movie camera. He films absolutely everyone who is involved in his life but his family, his straight friend and his mother's boyfriend are the main subjects of his intense study. It's actually a very unusual film and the way it is shown through the lens of the boy's camera is an approach to story telling that I have not seen in any other film. It records his passage through about a year of his adolescence, with plenty of candid and close up studies of his mother and grandmother as well as the two main men in his life, who both happen to be quite handsome men. It also records how he falls in love with his friend and his disappointment when he realises that his friend is definitely straight! Because of the unusual approach in filming it may not be to everyone's liking but it certainly left me feeling good. It's really quite a beautiful story.

• Beauty and Intimacy: The Means Can Be An End In Itself

  thomasdosborneii2003-07-12

  I'm not normally one to care so much about film technique or movie technology, the story or the characters are what usually drive my interest. However, this is the third film I have seen that was filmed using Digital Video (the other two were Barbet Schroeder's "Our Lady of the Assassins" and "Manic", both of which I have also reviewed here on IMDb) and I have come to realize that I like this style of movie-making very, very much. I might go so far as to say that the means may actually be the ends, although all these films have also given so much more than just an appealing technique. But to just simply feel that much closer and more intimate with beautiful and appealing people, regardless of their problems or whatever they are going through, is a pleasure just by itself. This film really could have been a video journal of a teenage ice skater, one who was, at least, quite skilled with the camera, and, in fact, throughout the film, I simply believed that such a video journal is what it actually was. Living in Los Angeles like I do where so many are would-be filmmakers, and at a time when so many kids have video cameras and are so often putting them in your face or surreptitiously filming you (and themselves), it would not be far-fetched that an ice skater as disciplined and talented as the actor in the film (genuinely a second-place holder in a French figure-skating championship) could also develop skill in this other artistic medium...as, indeed, successfully done by the skater Jimmy Tavares who also demonstrated his notable acting ability in this film. I found the video technique fascinating as, appropriately, an intimate visual expose of the coming of age of a character in a FILM, just like a diary or personal letters would be in a BOOK. It was as if Etienne, the ice skater, wanted to objectify his life by recording his activities and those of the other people who interacted with or were of interest to him in such a way that he could then step aside and see his life from the outside. It helped a lot that the boy, Etienne, was so beautiful, as was his whole family and the people associated with him, and his personality, as was theirs, was also so charming and humorous. It was not boring or meaningless to be with these people for a year (film time). In fact, I myself, not only want to buy my own video camera and start filming myself and all the people in my life, but I also wished all the people in my life were French! And the video camera with such great depth of field picks up so many more images in a scene that one does not normally see in a movie, and this quality added to the magnitude of the experience. For example, as Etienne would be filmed skating around in his practice arena, metro trains would go speeding by outside the arena's window with perfect clarity, adding the rhythm and beauty of their motion with that of the skater gracefully doing his swirls and spins. But all this intimacy and beauty in the camera work does not overshadow the fact that something is supposed to be happening with these characters, and, as far as I am concerned, there was no disappointment there. There were times when Etienne's subjects rebelled against his intruding in their life with his camera, and yet in the end the only one really intruded into was Etienne himself, who got particularly nervous or upset when others used his camera, but he was at the same time quite willing to film himself when he was the one at the controls. Inexorably, the story does move to the conclusion that must have been what had been motivating Etienne the whole time, and it was here that his good acting ability was revealed to be great. As appealing as Etienne's character had always been (despite his occasional anger or bad moods), upon achieving his self-realization, some subtle dark filter or cloud seemed to have been removed from his character and he then radiated a light that was several notches brighter than what had been expressed before. I almost would have thought that a filter had been removed from the camera lense, but this new light really was from within Jimmy Tavares, himself. And that what he came to understand about himself is nowadays understood to not necessarily be all that unusual or spectacular, for him, alone, of course, it certainly would matter very much and since we had been so close to him throughout the movie, it mattered to us, too. I could have watched so much more, but in this movie, the climax was also the denouement--as sudden as a camera can stop, or, more importantly, START (controlled with a simple pressing of a button on a remote control), so, too, are there sudden stops and starts in the life of the character effected, where what was before has now been severely EDITED, and the personal DEPTH OF FIELD is now so much greater.

• Etienne's video

  dbdumonteil2005-03-26

  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.

• A year in the life of a handsome ice skater boy

  liveheroes2003-03-25

  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.