REVIEW
RAISING VICTOR VARGAS
Starring Victor Rasuk, Donna Maldonado and Altagracia Guzman
Written and directed by Peter Sollett
Opens Friday, July 25
Uptown Screen
An old Hispanic woman and her three teenage grandchildren share a small apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Fumblingly, the children discover sex and love – the grandmother does not.
With the low-budget, cinéma verité, adolescent love story Raising Victor Vargas, writer-director Peter Sollett delivers something pretty close to the ideal American independent movie. But, like many other American ideals, this isn’t entirely a good thing. On the plus side, it’s a cute film with the easy intimacy and unpretentious presentation of a very good home video, it has a likeable cast portraying fairly likeable characters, and the plot is simple enough that sophistication in storytelling (be it in writing, direction, editing or acting) is not terribly important.
However, in filmmaking, honesty and immediacy are not virtues but strategies. Showing things "the way they are" presupposes that "the way things are" can be shown, and tends naturally to the conclusion that only what can be shown is real – reality becomes defined by the technology of its representation. For example, the turning point in this film’s central romance comes after young Victor’s brief attempt to present his new girlfriend to his family (and vice versa) ends in disaster – he wins her back by saying, "That’s who I am."
At first, I thought that the complete absence of an inner life for any of these characters was due simply to Sollett’s inability to convey complex emotions, by script or camera. Eventually, it became clear that he simply ignores that such things exist. Call me overly delicate, but I do not find this philosophy acceptable, regardless of how many sitcoms and commercials proclaim its truth.
So it does not seem valid to compare Raising Victor Vargas to the many recent films dealing with similar subjects in apparently similar ways (City of God is a distant but well-known example, while Central Station is a much closer parallel), as these simply do not exist in the same universe – the difference is that between entertainment and art. |
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