My Life on Ice
Directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau

Peter Pan
Directed by P.J. Hogan

A breakthrough by the always forward-thinking team Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau has just been made available by Wellspring dvd. Their latest production, My Life on Ice, accomplishes storytelling so emotionally effective and formally daring that its direct-to-video release changes current rules of movie- watching. Shown at last summer’s New Festival of Gay and Lesbian films, it’s one of the two most moving undistributed films I saw last year. (The other, Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth, shown at the New York Film Festival, still awaits release by Miramax.) If My Life on Ice never returns to a theater, watching it on DVD will still be worthwhile.

Without that usual annoying techno-gloss of a 35mm transfer that never looks sufficiently like film, the video-quality images seem personal and immediate. Ducastel and Martineau make the video experience–video awareness–the movie’s central theme.

Etienne, the 17-year-old hero played by Johnny Tavares, takes his video cam everywhere he goes in his hometown Rouen, recording a live-action diary. (The film’s original title is Ma Vraie Vie á Rouen.) This kid’s no Blair Witch wannabe–neither are Ducastel-Martineau (who made the picaresque Adventures of Felix). They use Etienne’s experiment to study what video means as a contemporary form of personal expression and as the successor to film. It’s Etienne’s means of dealing with adolescence; communicating his feelings to his best friend (Ludovic played by Lucas Bonnifait), his family (widowed mother Caroline, played by Ariane Ascaride) and to the world.

"This is the year of love," Etienne promises Ludo, but his goal isn’t simply to get laid. Etienne wants to discover his full human potential. That he’s shy about sex doesn’t mean he’s pre-sexual. Ducastel-Martineau (directing through Etienne’s point of view) privy the audience to a pubescent youth’s roaming eye and keen curiosity. He cruises with his videocam–watching couples, firemen, even following Ludo’s hook-up with various girls. His new way of seeing the world makes teenage gay consciousness vivid (the next step after Terence Davies’ gay childhood memories in The Long Day Closes. Etienne’s diaristic narrative blurs the line between verite and a liberated form of fiction. As Ducastel-Martineau offer his story, filmmaking is bound up with moral intent. My Life on Ice may look offhand, but it is impassioned.

Few American gay filmmakers go beyond promoting selfish prerogative. Etienne’s videocam project is an unabashed search for love and knowledge. Despite two decades of getting-laid movies, this is the first one to deepen that process. Etienne’s private thoughts are shared through his private vision. Thus Ducastel-Martineau survey the world credibly, sensitively.

Through Etienne’s lack of guile, the directors prove that movie truth–beauty–does not depend on the beholder but the camera-holder. In a startling moment, Etienne-the-interviewer’s own motives are interrogated. He is never in control of the world he records, but because he is capturing life, there are moments of danger–a drunken seduction, a grave accident, a suicide attempt. Ducastel- Martineau take accounting for human experience as their artistic responsibility. Since their debut, the politicized musical Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, these postmodern collaborators force viewer habits to become sophisticated–not naive. (Too many recent d-v films like Tape, Linklater’s motel- room film with Ethan Hawke, boast lazy technique; they promote the indie fallacy that ineptitude is a virtue along with the Hollywood fallacy that sex is just sex.)

Etienne is romantically interested in craft and honesty–an innocent stand-in for Ducastel- Martineau’s own hopes. Actor Johnny Tavares personifies their idealism with his long, open face and thick eyebrows that point downward, determined, toward his prominent nose. His earring signals a little vanity, but the video cam is Etienne’s fetish. He uses it as Sherlock Holmes used a magnifying glass. Annoyingly recording his grandmother (Helene Sugere) at his stepfather’s gravesite, he’s indulged with a patient, forgiving smile. When grandmother reminisces about a 20-year-old’s death (suicide? AIDS?), it’s as if she’s vouchsafing something to the doted-on Etienne, a wave of concern and complicity crossing her face. The moment’s realness reminded me of Ross McElwee’s documentary Charleen, a loving, verite portrait of a garrulous female friend. Ducastel-Martineau achieve McElwee’s beautiful humanism.

It’s the plangent close-ups of the people in Etienne’s viewfinder that distinguish this film. Although a candid-camera nuisance, Etienne finds the heart of his subjects. A peeping-tom montage on his mother undressing is no more invasive than when she’s dressed and he catches her still-girlish shyness. In dazzling friendship scenes with the strapping Ludo, who’s studying to be an actor, Etienne tells him that he has "presence–what actors need." It’s a techie’s adoration, flirtatious and inquiring like Godard first photographing Anna Karina. The camera’s intimacy pierces Ludo’s narcissism and releases his charm. All Etienne’s close-ups have this sublime effect, a gift that Jim Sheridan described as "filming the actor’s soul."

Despite Etienne’s random style, Ducastel-Martineau work strategically. Every image has been considered. When Etienne shoots Ludo rehearsing a Corneille speech ("On whom can one rely, O Lord, if one must always love, suffer and die!"), he’s stating feelings that neither adolescent can articulate, yet they’re visibly quizzical. Just then Etienne pauses, and his reflex is conveyed in a quick shift from the image of Ludo rehearsing to an uninhabited shot of a church frieze. It’s a philosophical double-take. My Life on Ice ponders making art about faith.

Caroline laments that Etienne’s other hobby, ice-skating, is also "a solitary passion," not a team sport like hockey. She doesn’t understand her son’s boldness or his need to isolate himself. (Her parental responsibility includes taking him to an anti-Le Pen rally.) When Etienne learns to pirouette (balance and spin) on ice, he’s symbolically acquiring technique, ways to move through life. He dares to take locker- room footage of a sexy fellow skater, but when sneaking candid shots of schoolteacher Laurent (Jonathan Zaccai), Etienne embarks on a confounding and potentially perilous route. Braving his infatuation, he introduces Laurent to Caroline, eventually making his teacher into his new father–a lover in the lofty, Ducastel-Martineau sense of male relationships that goes beyond sex to structure identity and provide wisdom (c.f. Adventures of Felix).

Every Ducastel-Martineau film keeps pace with developments in emotional consciousness (at one time that was the special appeal of European movies). Like Etienne’s adults talking about euros, the duo knows that technological and monetary change affects our emotions and alters the conceptual possibilities regarding art, sex and life. Quoting Corneille’s 18th-century speech about Parliament and the king making law together, not opposing each other as arbitrary authorities, is to the point of Ducastel-Martineau’s breakthrough approach to film and video. Because there’s no obvious video-versus-film contrast of Etienne’s footage with Ducastel-Martineau’s, this sometimes confuses who is actually shooting the non-subjective scenes.

But the confusion works; it radicalizes the movie. Ducastel-Martineau implicate themselves and the viewer in the cinema/video process. They propose Samson Raphaelson’s great question: Who Am I When I Watch a Movie?

Combining video and cinema, Ducastel-Martineau rescue gay life from mainstream cinema’s disregard and, incidentally but significantly, overtake the visual authority of video porn– the renegade erotic art that has been a sinecure for gay male fantasy. There’ s no false intimacy in My Life on Ice.

Its "personal" look suggests emotional 3-D. You can search the most trenchant moments in cinema history without finding anything lovelier than the scene where Etienne finally opens himself to the camera. "Is the timing right?" he asks. "We look different after making love," his first lover answers him. Seeing Etienne’s rebirth recovers the part of our selves we never see. At this point in the history of cinema-video relations, Ducastel-Martineau’s timing is impeccable.

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is foolproof, but P.J. Hogan has brought aptitude and vision to the newest adaptation. It starts right by casting as Peter and Wendy, Jeremy Sumpter and Rachel Hurd- Wood–puberty bursting out of the boy, blooming in the girl. Their eyes, the curl of their lips, the sensuality of Peter’s thrusting limbs create an immediate fascination no other Peter Pan has ever had. Playing with the euphemisms of a thimble and a kiss, they elevate fantasy to a level of intoxicating sophistication.

Barrie’s themes (time, maturity and death) erupt constantly, naturally. Clearly indebted to Spielberg’s 1991 Hook–the philological treatment of Barrie’s themes–Hogan simply follows the story. Since the groundwork has already been laid, Hogan can gambol and soar. Better than any other new film, the special f/x enhance the tale–drama and fantasy enhance each other. Children would enjoy this film, but unlike The Return of the King, you’ll get more out of it than they will.