Viva (2007)
Barbi (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.
“You’re not just dirty, Barbi, you’re abnormal!”