Viva (2007) +

An often intoxicatingly pitch-perfect genre/style stunt...an eye-candy homage to the styles and sensibilities that informed the sexploitation genre in the last moments before the hardcore revolution. Director-producer-writer-costume designer-editor-star Anna Biller delivers this story about a bored/neglected housewife in the early 1970s who naively stumbles from the sordid infidelities of suburbia into the free-love bacchanals of the big city. The film is built with an attention to visual detail that edges into the fetishistic -- every prop, costume and furniture piece are either (a) exactly right or (b) reconstructed with just enough clarity to evoke the original. As the protagonist Barbie/Viva, Anna Biller is pristinely awful -- a cardboard cipher of singsong line readings and self-consciously sexy postures -- and is, thus, absolutely perfect. The narrative is an Alice-In-Sexual-Wonderland sort of story and Biller's performance anchors the entire film in a kind of cluelessness (is she innocent? is she wordlessly seductive? or is she just dumb?) that really helps modulate the pitch of the erratically configured performances. Biller does set the tone in a lot of ways but the rest of her actors are all over the place. As Barbie's more mercenary/slutty best friend Sheila, Bridget Brno has a really solid sense of theatrical style that infuses some essential clarity and verve into her scenes; hers is a performance of the old school (echos of Roz Russell and Elizabeth Montgomery and Tina Louise mixed with a dash of Kim Cattrall) that results in an elegantly slutty characterization of the perfect sidekick for our basically innocent heroine. Brno's performance, however, stands in stark stylistic contrast to that of Jared Sanford as Mark, Sheila's Husband. Where Brno's Sheila is slick and stylish, Sanford's Mark is garishly comic -- he's more Charles Nelson Reilly on the Match Game -- and his performance is as funny and as freaky as Brett Michaels on same. Finally, there's Chad England as Barbie's beloved husband Rick, the kind of stuff shirt hunky straight man whose a stock character in the camp theatrics of Charles Busch. The various performance styles can be a touch discombobulating but Biller's own auteurism helps to smooth the edges: Biller's Barbie/Viva is really at the center of this nonsense and her calming presence in every scene works almost as a quaalude to make it all just fine. I'm not sure what else to say about the film except that it's fun, funny, often fabulous and utterly strange. I laughed throughout, mostly in a Brechtian way, for the utter brilliance of Biller's manipulation of the genre. This isn't an exercise in Austin Powersish silly self-indulgence but a more mysterious journey through the variations of this genre -- from Jacqueline Susann to Russ Meyer -- with the fantasies of middlebrow opulence staged as a kind of hyperheterosexual lifestyle porn for wannabe swinging singles. (Indeed, the film doesn't feel all that different from Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice in its unselfconscious thrill at the trappings of upper-middle-class privilege.) One aspect of the film that is routinely startling is how Biller does not shy from the genre's reliance on sexual assault as an alibi for staging a sexual scenario; Biller does not offer comment on this but instead permits it to be a jarring aspect of this genre's pleasures when encountered by a contemporary audience. However, one feature of the genre that Biller does veer from is the use of casual nudity. To be sure, there is plenty of casual nudity in this film, especially that of secondary characters (for the most part the principals do not show ween or poon). That said, for every randomly naked girl there is a comparably random/naked boy. Weens are popping up all the time and it's often quite entertaining. There's one excellently funny sequence when Viva's visiting some guru guy and his followers are all naked and, during a musical number, we get to see extended scenes of wagging wangs as they boogie down to some hippie song. And I must say that my favorite scene was the one where Barbie (before she became Viva) visited a superfaggy hair dresser named Sherman, and there's an extended strange flirtation between Barbie, Sherman and some weird guy that mostly reminded me of Fred from Scooby Doo -- when some drug or another is ingested it becomes a threesome and Barry Morse's Sherman strips down to reveal the most muscular male physique in the entire film. It's a strange little scene, but quite amusing/thrilling. Same for the big set piece toward the end when Viva does an extended musical number dressed as Isis. The film is consistently strange, almost as consistently fun, and curiously effective. It's clear the movie was made as a labor of love and it shows. I don't know who the audience for this film really is, but it's an adoring homage to an era of culture and an era of filmmaking that is long gone.