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Viva
Directed by Anna Biller
Released: 2008
Starring Anna Biller, Jared Sanford, Bridget Brno, and Chad England
Running Time: 120 minutes
Region: 0 NTSC
DVD Studio:
Cult Epics
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Barbi (played by Anna Biller) has everything
that the typical suburban housewife could ever want. She has great
friends, sexy Sheila (Bridget Brno) and swingin’ Mark (Jared Sanford), and
a manly husband, Rick (Chad England). But this is 1972 and the sexual
revolution is calling. With their marriages on the rocks, Barbi and Sheila
become call girls in order to find themselves. Renaming herself Viva,
Barbi’s journey leads her into a decadent world of sex and drugs. Jumping
from one strange bedfellow to the next, Barbi finds that the pursuit of
pleasure may be even more complicated than she ever realized.
Viva comes bounding into our world like an
errant transmission from a campy and kitschy parallel universe where 1972
never ended. Writer, director, and star Anna Biller loads her subversive
and surreal film into a happy shotgun and shoots it point blank into our
smiling, slack-jawed faces. This lavish indie production has excellent
camerawork, eye-popping set designs, fantastic costumes, and a sickly sweet lounge soundtrack.
The cast of Viva keeps things nice and
artificial. This gang delivers the raunchy soap opera dialogue like it was
going out of style and handle the inexplicable situations and ferocious
stereotypes with ease. Special awards go out to all for keeping straight
faces delivering such insane dialogue (and a few extra stars for keeping
it together during the riotously ridiculous hippy nudist camp sequence). I
refuse to play favorites here because everyone is so totally committed to
making this bizarre world work that I could go on forever.
Ah 1972, when men were men and women were their doormats. Biller’s
delirious version of the sexual revolution is delightfully ironic. Taking
cues from Playboy and other men’s magazines of the age, the world of
Viva is a fever dream of a bygone era that
never really existed. With commercials for liquor and tobacco written into
the script, it’s a trash mag (equal parts hilarious and disturbing) come
to life!
Imagine Beyond the Valley of the Dolls soaked
in kerosene and set afire with a flame thrower and you might have an idea
of what Viva is like. Saturated with sex and
nudity, this delirious film even has musical numbers and a trippy animated
sequence that would have been right at home in a sleazy softcore romp from
the early 70s. With a dedicated cast and a director with an unshakeable
grasp on her vision, I can’t help but wholeheartedly recommend
Viva to anyone with a taste for excessive
camp or even just a perverse sense of humor.
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Quotes
“You’re not just dirty, Barbi, you’re abnormal!”
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DVD Stuff
Cult Epics presents
Viva (Unrated Version) in a sumptuously pristine anamorphic
widescreen transfer with lush stereo sound. Extras include a
behind-the-scenes featurette with audio commentary by Anna Biller, a
slideshow, and the trailer for Viva. That’s it?
I have to say I was expecting much more. While informative, the commentary
by Biller is just a small view into the production and her filmmaking style.
I have to admit that I’m left wanting more. Hopefully, there is a special
edition of Viva in the works.
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