Viva deliberately and self-consciously evokes the era of late ‘60s and early ‘70s sexploitation films, even down to the production design and music. As far as style is concerned, Viva is a resounding success, with even the film stock looking just right. I may stand to be corrected, but like director Anna Biller’s subsequent film The Love Witch, Viva was shot on 35mm film, and printed from an original cut negative. This lends the film a faux authenticity that further blurs the line between originality and homage. If this was on a television and you were channel surfing, you may well think it was from circa 1969. As a fan of that era and being happily willing to have nostalgic memories of other films and television evoked, this is an aesthetic I am very much on board with.
While I can appreciate that Viva may have something to say beyond the purely visual engagement (and I confess I was already aware of Biller’s work, her feminist stance and exploration of the ‘female gaze’, before I watched it), Viva is a comedy that simply isn’t funny. Its pacing is a leaden as the performances, which are deliberately lousy and any laughter will prove as false as the equally and deliberately hollow peals of laughter from the characters, who seem to exist in gaudy tableaus of consumerism and permissiveness, which is part of the message but also probably more to fulfil an aesthetic ideal than drive a narrative. And there is a narrative, of course, but it is a secondary concern to the nostalgia, subversion and exaggeration of stereotypes. Biller, boldly taking centre stage in her own film, plays a bored housewife who eventually embraces the permissive lifestyle of the counterculture. But, like the film as a whole, Biller’s mannered performance eventually lost my interest and patience. I understood it was a conscious choice, but like the day-glo interiors and fashions which appear from another era, my appearance of sustained attention would have been just as false.
At the time of writing, Viva is available to view on BFI’s online subscription service.
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