Viva

All hail Anna Biller, a one-woman film studio who wears her influences with all the mash-note love of a dyed in the wool fangirl, and her riotous debut, Viva. A film destined for cult-like devotion, Viva finds Biller writing, directing, producing, starring, designing, and editing her story of a bored housewife stumbling into sexual revolution before returning home to her impossibly handsome husband.

It's nearly too much of a movie as it stands, Biller could seriously use an outsider editor to help narrow her focus, as if you’re drinking cinema straight from the hose on full blast. Everything is purposefully stilted, and arch played with a wink and a nod as if it were all a grandiose burlesque, which it is in a way. Biller’s self-conciously campy tribute and critique of the films of Russ Meyer finds out what would happen if Tura Satana was a bored housewife with a distinctly lacking sex life that drove her towards an existential crisis.

Biller’s Barbi gets dumped by her Ken (actually, his name is Rick, but it might as well be Ken), and acts as unwitting magnet to the entirety of 1970s sex politics, both as something to experiment with and victim of its double-standards. It is here that Viva becomes something of an episodic sexual odyssey that frequently meanders too much for its own good from a nudist retreatment to a climatic hedonistic orgy, no erogenous zone goes unexplored.

And it is frequently too much for one movie to handle, even one as pleasingly colorful and textured as this one. The energy dips and sags at various points and the musical interludes could easily have been jettisoned to tighten things up. But there’s still so much to enjoy from the purposefully bad acting, which causes lines like “There’s nothing I like more than being wet” and “I always wanted to be a prostitute” into beautiful bon mots.

Sure, taking potshots at the Playboy lifestyle might seem easy, but Biller’s Cheshire grin knows when to revel in the kitsch and when to stop long enough to make an emphatic point. Barbi might be taking on sexploitation, but she frequently announces that she’ll be doing it on her own terms. In Scotchgarded fabrics, shag rugs, and heavy blue eyeshadow.