Viva

Whomever called this satire a masterpiece of erotic cinema has got to be on some pretty hard drugs. Viva is very much a comedy with the kind of weird, stupid humor that can be hit or miss. Movies like Jim Hosking's An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018) and Anna Biller's other feature film The Love Witch (2016) accomplished this with considerably superior skill, and are two of my favorite comedies.

Unfortunately Viva is to The Love Witch what The Greasy Strangler (2016) is to Beverly Luff Linn. The stupid is piled on so heavily that at times it's just boring or annoying. What saves Viva though are the expert stylistic settings and brilliant colors, along with dry inside jokes that will mainly be appreciated by Italian giallo and/or Hammer studio fans.

Anna Biller is a feminist film maker and I would go as far as to say Viva is also too subtle with feminist themes. As a director she improved considerably on both comic writing and clear messaging while maintaining her trademark neo-70s visual aesthetics with her later 2016 masterpiece.

An affectionate send-up of 60's and 70's sexploitation schlock, Viva is the brainchild of star, writer, director, producer, editor Anna Biller. Word has it she also catered the film, drove the actors to set and held the boom while simultaneously acting in front of the camera. I'm only half kidding. But it illustrates a problem with the film which is that with one person assuming so many of the key creative roles there's the risk of a loss of objectivity in the creative process and fewer people to hold the tendency towards self-indulgence in check.

Watching Viva, I couldn't help but feel it would have made a great short. There's about thirty minutes of interesting material here stretched out over a two hour running time. Once you get what the film is going for in its beginning act with the intentionally stilted performances, the mod set design, the garish color palette, Viva holds few surprises the rest of the way. That isn't to say the film is without its pleasures. Biller has the look of those films down pat - the aforementioned set design, the cinematography, the hair and makeup are completely evocative of the type of film-making Russ Meyer, Italian director Pasquale Campanile et al. made their names in back in the day. The performances, though, are uneven. Biller is fine as the titular character but some actors (notably the actor playing the hair dresser) do everything but look straight into the camera and wink directly at the audience. There's an art to acting in this kind of satire (see the Planet Terror portion of Grindhouse.

All in all, an interesting addition to what seems to be an emerging trend of films that attempt to revive long dead genres apparently beginning with 2003's Down With Love and then gaining mainstream popularity with Robert Rodriguez's Sin City in 2005.

With the film starting off with the narrator stating it's the year 1972 and we are introduced to our protagonist, writer/director/star Anna Biller, reading the book in the bathtub "Decorating with Crochet," we have the perfect campy 70s set up for this modern feminist take on the 70s sexual revolution. I'm obsessed with writer/director Anna Biller's film THE LOVE WITCH, which had a 1960s Technicolor aesthetic that blew me away, as well as cleverly turning sexist gender norms of the time on their head, so I finally got around to seeing her first film, VIVA. In this film, Biller herself plays an ordinary 1970s housewife who has something of an awakening during that era's sexual revolution. However, she pretty much experiences the worst aspects of the revolution (sexist swinging, orgies, nudist camps, prostitution, drugging, assault, etc.). The hippie nudist colony episode was probably my favorite, with its hilarious stupid hippie love song (it was very "Saturday Market" community stage). Thematically, Biller beat Gretta Gerwig's BARBIE by about 15 years when it comes to humorously challenging the patriarchy in a campy manner (though I suppose Aristohanies did it first with Lysistratain in ancient Greece). While VIVA has a light tone, it's a pretty dark story. One thing Biller does that Gerwig did not is mock the "male gaze," which she does to a tee. Biller said she based several of the scenes on Playboy cartoons, which is a brilliant way to capture the era's media objectification of women. Biller compared her character to Voltaire's Candidate, an innocent with an inappropriately positive outlook toward a very bad world. VIVA is purposefully presented, acted, and shot in an overly mannered fashion that will either click for audiences or not. It's going to either annoy or delight viewers, but I found the purposefully campy acting and dialogue hilarious, along with the cheesy wigs, sets, and outfits (which were actually pretty spot on). The soundtrack borrows heavily from Italian film soundtracks of the 60s and 70s and works fantastically well. I've been listening to a Spotify playlist for this movie for a while now. VIVA reminded me of John Waters' films. Waters's low-budget campy representations of the 1950s and 60s are very similar to Biller's low-budget campy representation of the early 70s. Waters and Biller's campy acting and dialogue are also quite similar. For a low-budget film, the photography is quite good. The colors pop in a bright, lively way, like it's an episode of THE MONKEES. Impressively, not only did Biller write, direct, and star in the film, but she's pretty much a one-woman show, also doing the music, production design, editing, costumes, animation, and producing the film. My only complaint is the lack of a strong narrative throughline, with Biller's character simply moving from one awful event to the next, and at two hours, it would have been a stronger film if it had been tightened up. Still, VIVA is a smart and hilarious critique of the patriarchy, even when the woke 70s men think they're being progressive.

I don't remember the 1970s being this bad. As I began to watch this, I thought "why?" Wooden or ham acting, twee soundtrack, garish clothing... and then, realising it's a parody, I began to embrace it. Leaving her mundane life of cooking and making cocktails for her husband, Barbi becomes Viva. In the style of Russ Meyer, her adventures include bad sex, nudism, drugs and a lesbian dalliance but always men are pursuing her. It's not a serious work and I admire Anna Biller's dedication to her art, having written, directed and starred in her oeuvre, plus baring all her charms for the camera, quite nicely too. I particularly liked the line of wigs worn by all and sundry, most looking as of made from polyester and looking through the credits I spotted "extra hair" which might explain how some of the cast were sporting what might have been merkins as these days everyone seems to want to look prepubescent and shaves their genital areas. If you like 70s style racy films, it's for you.

Never before has a modern film so perfectly succeeded in capturing the look, style and feel of the 70's Sexploitation classics. Anna Biller's "Viva" is an explosion of color, humor and schlock done to the nines, besting attempts made by far bigger-budgeted flicks like "Austin Powers" and "Grindhouse" in truly recreating a bygone era. It's a true skin-comedy epic that delivers everything the gorgeous promotional art promises, and will no doubt become a cult classic among those with a true affinity for well-done homage. I watched this with some friends and there were times when we had to actually stop the DVD because we were laughing so hard! The prostitution and nudist camp scenes are simply unbelievable. Highly recommended.