'Viva' mocks cheap porno conventions
By Phil Villarreal
Pvillarreal@azstarnet.com
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.17.2008
With intentionally stilted acting, cliché-saturated dialogue and costumes that are straight out of "Scooby-Doo," "Viva" packs an ample supply of snark.
Watching the "Austin Powers"-like send-up of dirty 1970s flicks feels like channel surfing late at night and getting stuck on a movie that's so bad it's entertaining, only "Viva" was actually designed that way.
Writer/director/star Anna Biller is the driving creative force behind the oddball film. She also handled the music as well as set and costume design. She has said she gleaned the overall look of the film from old Playboy magazines.
Cheap porno sensibilities flow through Biller's entrancing, though not quite cohesive, production as she takes her audience through one stereotypical, B-minus scene after another as viewed by yet another stereotype: the leisure-suit-wearing, sexist male.
It's 1972, and suburbanite Barbi (Biller) and next-door neighbor Sheila (Bridget Brno) fritter away their afternoons boozing and flirting with each other's deadweight husbands.
When both women separate from their men at the same time, they make a pact to live life more fully and experience the sexual revolution in all its sinful glory. With Sheila in tow for part of the way, Barb changes her name to Viva, becomes a call girl, takes a female lover, visits a nudist colony, becomes a photographer's muse and is recruited for a nude musical.
The maelstrom is a far cry from an early moment in which Barbi indulges herself by sitting in a bath and swapping out a crochet magazine for a porn rag.
For the most part things are sassy as the two-hour film unfolds with deadpanned lines (Sheila: "I've always wanted to be a prostitute. Seems so romantic."), garish tributes to the decade that fashion sense forgot, and naked displays so explicit the unrated movie would surely earn an NC-17.
The film takes dark, abrupt turns with scenes of sexual assaults, as well as a rape accompanied by animation that simulates an acid trip.
The jarring shifts seem like an attempt to ground the otherwise light material to make a point about real-world reflections of exploitation cinema. But "Viva" sometimes feels like an example of what it's mocking.
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