Most comedies depend on a specific amount of established tropes: the obsessive finest buddy, the stereotyped psychotherapist, the randy 20-year-old. Apart from providing consolation, this type of familiarity can perform like a reassuring blanket wrapped round such probably discomforting points as feminine sexuality, the Grim Reaper and what it means to be a 40-year-old girl making an attempt to make sense of a messy life. Established Spanish actress Aina Clotet’s “Viva” (given the anodyne English title “Alive”) is all these items, fleshed out by a flawed protagonist confronted with the potential recurrence of breast most cancers shortly after a partial mastectomy. Clotet — director, co-writer and star — certainly makes Nora “alive,” greater than many of the one-dimensional aspect characters, however whether or not she succeeds in creating a job compelling sufficient to stability out the overfamiliarity of well-worn formulation will very a lot rely on particular person affinities.
That it’s been picked up pre-Cannes for French distribution by Haut et Court docket is an efficient signal that the goal demographic will coalesce round Nora’s journey, and such religion is sort of actually justified. Few comedies are so upfront about mastectomy scars (each bodily and emotional), and Clotet isn’t afraid to write down Nora into conditions that don’t mirror properly on her character. Let’s face it, life is filled with silly selections. But “Viva” is constrained by simply how predictable so most of the characterizations are. The ultimate shot, meant to really feel liberating and, sure, Alive!, is very easy and pat that it intensifies sure niggling dissatisfactions popping up all through the working time.
From its opening shot, of a breast being compressed for a mammogram, it’s clear Clotet needs to brush away all of the taboos surrounding diseased breasts and unsettle the male gaze. (“Ah,” some might say, “the DP is a man.” However isn’t it time we moved past binary assumptions of who wields “the gaze?”) Nora is again for a check-up on the oncologist, but when the physician tells her that her scans reveal a small progress within the wholesome breast, she refuses a biopsy and for the subsequent 110 minutes does all the things she will to keep away from coping with what may be rising in her physique.
If we haven’t already found out that Nora feels trapped in her life, there’s the scene after, through which lengthy strips of fly paper, noticed with captive prey, dangle across the house she shares along with her eco-friendly companion Tom (Naby Dakhli). A heatwave and drought aren’t the one issues inflicting pheromones to spike: There are additionally the sexts from 20-year-old Max (It-boy Marc Soler), the cousin of her finest buddy Ari (Zaira Pérez). Persistence pays off in a really well-played scene with Nora nervously revealing her mastectomy scar to the unruffled Max — viva Gen Z!
This vulnerability relating to her altered physique kinds the movie’s robust go well with, countering her troubled relationship along with her new asymmetry by embracing her inside MILF, courtesy of an objectified younger hottie unfazed by what a lot of the world would possibly name her lately acquired imperfections: We’ve come a great distance from the 1978 TV film “First, You Cry.” Right here’s the place “Viva” comes alive, fleshed out by Clotet and Soler as an irresponsible grownup paired with a libidinous pet, having intercourse subsequent to a greasy field of chilly pizza. Nora’s at a crossroads, figuring out the steadiness of Tom, the person who stood by her when most cancers took its toll, is the secure choice. However with mortality lurking within the background, she has a have to shake issues up, irrespective of how reckless it might appear.
Much less profitable are the opposite conditions she will get into, all of which really feel unremarkably by-product. There’s her finest buddy Ari — her solely buddy, it appears — who’s pregnant and tediously obsessive; her kooky however loving shrink mother Sònia (Lloll Bertran); her new, extreme co-worker Zeymey (Sau-Ching Wong), threatening to take her place. Even making Nora a researcher in mobile growing older feels too handy, as if Clotet and her co-writer Valentina Viso felt they wanted to overcompensate for Nora’s messiness by making all the things else too tidy. Nowhere is that this extra obvious than in a montage of snapshots throughout which the characters recount all the things, spoon-feeding us info that ought to both be implied or not there in any respect.
It’s particularly disappointing on condition that Clotet offers Nora grit, unafraid not solely to show her physique however her self-destructive humanity. A playful, then violent mud combat with Max is skillfully dealt with and Clotet proves that she has strengths behind in addition to in entrance of the digital camera. But being alive means greater than energetically embracing the second. For a comedy designed round one thing so severe, it additionally requires plausible relationships embodied by characters of equal depth.
