Viva

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.

If you are going to watch only one Anna Biller film, then I'd unreservedly recommend that instead of this. (Quite apart from anything else, Samantha Robinson is a proper and impressive actress - sadly something mainly absent here.)

Viva does however have its own kitsch charm - but if you are going to parody bad acting then it helps to look like it's deliberate. Here, the dialogue is mostly awful and delivered poorly, although there are some inventive moments such as the animation sequence, and the plot does sort-of hang together.

If you're an AB completist then you'll have seen this already, but even if not it's worth a look to see how she developed her style.

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.

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.