''My Life on Ice'' () is a 2002 French

teen drama In film and television show, television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or docudrama, semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humour, humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional te ...

film directed by

Olivier Ducastel Olivier Ducastel (born 23 February 1962) is a French film director, screenwriter and sound editor who collaborates with his partner, Jacques Martineau. Life and career After spending his adolescence in Rouen, Martineau moved to Paris to stud ...

and Jacques Martineau, which tracks a year in the life of a teenage

figure skater Figure skating is a sport in which individuals, pairs, or groups perform on figure skates on ice. It was the first winter sport to be included in the Olympic Games, with its introduction occurring at the 1908 Olympics in London. The Olympic d ...

in a quasi-documentary, video diary style.

Plot

The film centers on Étienne, who lives in

Rouen Rouen (, ; or ) is a city on the River Seine, in northwestern France. It is in the prefecture of Regions of France, region of Normandy (administrative region), Normandy and the Departments of France, department of Seine-Maritime. Formerly one ...

with his mother and grandmother and intends to take part in the national figure skating championship. For his 16th birthday, his grandmother gives him a digital camcorder as a present, which he starts to use immediately (supplying the introductory scenes of the film). Étienne films anything and everything around him – his family, his teacher Laurent, Ludovic, his best friend, himself figure skating, the sea, steep cliffs. As for Ludovic and his geography teacher, it soon becomes apparent that his obsession with them is grounded in more than just artistic pursuits. Étienne's

homosexuality Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or Human sexual activity, sexual behavior between people of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexu ...

becomes more and more clear both to him and the audience over the course of the film. Even though Étienne is determined to make this year "the year of love", the year when everything turns around for him, things do not go as well as anticipated. He makes a blunder in his figure skating performance and only achieves second place. After a night of drinking, during which Laurent, who is in a relationship with Etienne's mother, seems to show Etienne an ambiguous mutual attraction, Etienne witnesses Laurent's fall from a cliff; a fall that the viewer, like Etienne, will understand as deliberate, probably due to the young boy's frustration. And when he starts, very carefully, to talk to Ludovic about the possibility of two men being in love, Ludovic runs away. In the final minutes of the film, the purpose of Étienne's video diary gets clear: Feeling he has failed in what he set out to do and being deeply hurt by Ludovic's resentment, Étienne decides to jump from the cliff and leave the camcorder (which he sets up to film his suicide) behind to explain to his family what he went through. Luckily, a stranger walks by at that moment and notices the boy close to the cliff and his camera nearby. The final scene shows the stranger and Étienne in bed after sex, with Étienne seeming truly happy for the first time.

Cast

* Jimmy Tavares as Étienne * Ariane Ascaride as Caroline, Étienne's mother * Jonathan Zaccaï as Laurent, Étienne's teacher and his mother's boyfriend * as Étienne's grandmother * Lucas Bonnifait as Ludovic, Étienne's best friend * Hanako Bron as Vanessa, Ludovic's girlfriend *

Frédéric Gorny Frédéric Gorny (born 6 September 1973, in Asnières-sur-Seine) is a French actor known for his role as attorney Pierre Clément on the television series ''Cherif (TV series), Cherif''. , he has been in about thirty television series and films s ...

as the young man at the cliff

References

External links

* 2002 films 2000s coming-of-age drama films 2002 LGBTQ-related films 2000s sports drama films 2000s teen drama films Figure skating films Films directed by Jacques Martineau Films directed by Olivier Ducastel Films set in Normandy Films shot in Normandy French coming-of-age drama films French teen LGBTQ-related films French sports drama films French teen drama films Gay-related films LGBTQ-related coming-of-age drama films LGBTQ-related sports drama films Rouen Teen sports films 2002 drama films 2000s French films {{LGBTQ-drama-film-stub