Viva

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.

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.

The demented genius behind A VISIT FROM THE INCUBUS strikes again. Seriously, though, what is VIVA? Caught this about seven months ago and am still trying to take it all in. I loved this film because I never knew what was going to happen next, despite it following the model of '60's/'70's sexploitation films pretty closely. The first few minutes are simply exhilarating. A young housewife leafs through a skin mag in her bathtub, gets herself ready for the outside world, and blasts off in some bad-ass muscle car, just as the wonderful piece of vintage loungecore music on the soundtrack reaches a crescendo. (At least that's how I remember it.) Sublime; I'm at a loss to think of a better opening scene. (TOUCH OF EVIL, studio cut, perhaps? It's too close to call.) Then we settle in for the long haul. The housewife is hanging out with her friends, a married couple. Things get inappropriate. How far will it go? Exactly what kind of a movie is this? That's really the question that VIVA dares the viewer to answer. I'm still not sure. Satire or pornography? Happily, the answer is yes.

The film is two hours. That would be hard to justify if it were just a slavish imitation of vintage softcore porn. Or just a spoof of same. Instead, it's almost a suspense film. How long has it been since an American film had me wondering who among the cast was going to disrobe? Who was going to disrobe NEXT? Who will have sex next? Will it even be consensual?! All those people constantly cruising each other. Predatory. With the color-soaked visual panache of Radley Metzger in Eastmancolor, but with a storyline from a Joe Sarno film where everyone thinks and talks about sex all the time, has weird, anonymous, masked sex all the time, and never enjoys it. Almost exactly like the adult world seemed to me in 1972. Plus deadly serious feminist self-reflexivity for the unwashed masses and nude dancers with their wieners bobbing hilariously for intellectuals like myself, courtesy of a nudist camp scene that is exactly like Blake Edwards WOULD have done it in A SHOT IN THE DARK, if Hollywood censorship had already relaxed, and he was on angel dust. And all the while, the deliciously arch Jared Sanford does his best to act dozens of naked people off the screen. Two hours was barely enough. Bring on the 70mm IMAX release, the three-disc DVD special edition with the signed and numbered lithographs, and the "Vote for Viva" t-shirts in every trendy mall novelty store.

I caught this film at it's Pre - World Premiere at a press screening at the Rotterdam Film Festival back in January of this year and I really enjoyed it, mainly because I have never seen anything quite like it before and don't expect that I will likely ever see anything like it again.

The first thing that swept me away was the set design / art direction: right from the get go I had the feeling I was back in the 70's except it wasn't through the usual played out typical Hollywood re-interpretation of what the seventies were supposed to have looked like, this film elicits a "Holy S*** the filmmakers must have gotten their hands on a warehouse full of actual items from the 70's" sensation (and apparently they did collect props for years). The films colors are absolutely dazzling, the look achieved in the film is almost as if the director was aiming to visually reproduce the feel of a Technicolor film as filtered through copious amounts of LSD.

The characters the actors were portraying often came off as mindless automatons, sort of stereotypical parodies of American archetypes if you will, the performances were often wooden to the point of disbelief – almost as if they were trying to overact in a very detached manner, it worked quite well and added to the overall sense of "disbelief" I had while watching this film. Some of the lines the actors deliver were so incredibly vapid yet delivered so deadpan that I could not control my laughter, sometimes the sets alone were enough to make me giggle.

While the film certainly parodies B flicks on one level, on another it truly works as a piece of calculated and subversive art by reversing the usual misogynistic dynamics of the typical exploitation film: we see the repressed lead character Barbi transform into "Viva" who becomes self aware and empowered by discovering and reveling in her sexuality ( the animated orgasm scene is pretty awesome, apparently Anna Biller also animated this sequence! ) thus I venture to guess that Anna Biller may have very well created the first "post-feminist 70's era B flick exploitation homage film" - anyone know of anything else out there like this? I would definitely recommend this film to fans of John Waters work as well as anyone interested in feminist or subversive art, hell, Anna Biller's art direction alone warrants at least two viewings. All in all I really enjoyed the film, I do wish I had been just a little bit fresher for the screening as per film festival requirements I had slept about four hours the previous evening and was still a bit hungover. I hope I get the chance to see this film again because I would not hesitate to make some phone calls and round up a posse, Viva is definitely a film experience that would make for some excellent post film discussion over drinks.

If I were to make a criticism about Viva It would be that I think the film could use a little more time in the cutting room to trim it up perhaps just a wee bit, given that I was watching a world premiere I will assume that what I saw was perhaps the "directors cut". Regardless, Viva really is an achievement on several levels and it should certainly solidify Anna Biller as one of the freshest new multi-talented directorial voices of today.

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.