Review: Viva (2008)

The length I have to go to "sell" a film to my girlfriend is an acid test of how much I'm prepared to like the film for the wrong reasons. It wasn't easy explaining what Viva was about when booking tickets for the Curzon Soho Q&A screening last week without using the terms soft-core "Carry On", spoof 60s schlock, or Russ Meyers style titty-fest.

Writing about the film now I can describe Viva as a funny, lovingly veracious, modern day celebration of 60s and 70s sexploitation films. The film colourfully grandstands a carnival of characters, kitsch sets, period garb, and party catering!

Viva is the masterwork of feminist Anna Biller, who is obviously as talented as she is endowed and can not only claim credits for starring role, writer and director, but she also had a hand in the set design too.

Biller plays Barbi, a bored suburban housewife of 1972 Los Angeles who yearns for freedom beyond the floor scrubbing and slipper fetching her work obsessed husband allows her. Inspired by a Playboy magazine picked up at her neighbour's pool party, Barbi adopts the pseudonym of Viva - Italian for  "to live" - and registers with a modeling agency. So begins a journey that sees Barbi pair up with her best friend Sheila as call girls, pose as life models, and audition for a naked "Hair"-like musical. Their babes in the woods experimentation culminates at an orgiastic costume party that must have been lifted from Beyond The Valley of the Dolls.

Looks wise Anna Biller is to Tura Satana (Faster Pussycat Kill Kill) what Robin Askwith ("Confession of a" series) was to Brian Jones and even shares his tick of gormlessness in lieu of cool when held a beat in close up. Biller's bad acting is affectation and she sexes it up with an array of outrageous garments she designed herself; a see through top, multitude of negligees, and a gold fringed headdress are but some. Alongside Biller, Bridget Brno, who played Sheila, is definitely vintage pin-up material. Her character embraces the sexual revolution and in her chosen guise as Candy asserts the killer line "I've always wanted to be a prostitute, it sounds so romantic".

It was a pleasure to see "real women" like Biller and Brno bare all on screen, time and time again, even if the situations they were forced to undress were scripted with a deliberately heavy hand. Judging by appearances either a Ladyshave amnesty was enforced during filming or LA's finest Merkin weaver worked overtime in addition to their cameo - a cutaway in one scene reveals her doing a spot of backcombing on a model's never region. The nudity in the film is as refreshingly innocent as it is tongue in cheek. I cried tears of laughter as Elmer, one of Barbi's clients and a hippie guitarist at a nudist camp, broke into song about free love whilst the nudists danced around him.
 
Most of the cast could have come straight out of 60s mondo movies - even those that didn't quite fit, bad acting accepted, looked all the better for it. My favourite character was the artist Clyde - one part David Hemmings had Antonioni let him brood camply, two parts The Monkees' Davy Jones had the producers let him grow a pair.
 
Viva reminded me of the Terry Southern story "Candy". Given Sheila's non de plume and Barbi being short for Barberella (another Southern creation) I'm in no doubt it was Biller's intention to name check “Candy”. Viva like “Candy” is an absurdist fantasy, but substitutes the sex and satire for a feminist slant and frame-by-frame attention to the aesthetic. This is by no means a spoiler but despite Barbi and Sheila's forays into liberation they remain boxed in by men's stereotypes.
 
Although Viva is intelligent and stylized there are plenty of laugh out loud moments and even a couple druggy psychedelic wig outs, including a musical number about a white horse and a Yellow Submarine style animated hallucination. If you get chance to see Viva on the big screen, do, otherwise it will be no less astonishing on DVD at home.
 
Groovy Bob