The transgender community has dominated cultural consciousness over the past month for all of the wrong reasons. It has been the target of discriminatory legislation passed in North Carolina and Mississippi, leading to the sort of outrage on social media that has come to typify our era. It is the subject on our collective lips, so to speak. Given this context, the release date for director Paddy Breathnach’s Viva, a film meditating upon transsexuality in the midst of family discord, is quite auspicious.
Viva traces the coming-of-age story of Jesus (Héctor Medina), a gay Havana teenager scuffling to scrape up enough money to pay his rent. His most salient source of income comes from hairdressing for a collection of drag queens who perform at a local club. Jesus yearns to dance himself, to come (literally and figuratively) out of the shadows with his sexuality. When he finally gets his chance, a strange man emerges from the crowd and punches him in the face. The man is his estranged father Angel (Jorge Perugorría), a former boxer who spent most of Jesus’ life in prison.
With this plot twist, Viva becomes a family drama as well as a coming-of-age one. In the film’s second act, Jesus and Angel struggle to reconcile the dissonance that Angel’s prison sentence forged in their relationship. Angel seems reluctantly accepting of his son’s sexuality but refuses to allow him to perform at the club. This generates both tension and money problems. Angel is also an alcoholic whose persistent intoxication generates further issues between the two protagonists.
To guide the film to its climax and ending, the third act is introduced with another narrative twist. While this plot progression is heavily foreshadowed and ultimately conventional, Viva executes the conclusion capably. It takes a well-trod path toward filmic reconciliation, mixes it up with Jesus, a delightfully ambiguous character—the gay transgender teenage son of an absentee boxer—and creates something exciting and emotional if not exactly new. It is accurate to characterize this film as yet another coming-of-age tale of family discord, but such a summation is also unfair. It is an exemplary and unique attempt at such a tired tale.
This is not to say that Viva is without its shortcomings. This is a very rare film, set and largely photographed in Havana, but the Cuban capital’s photogenic nature is not utilized well at all. While it is true that Breathnach, an Irishman, has been able to travel freely to Cuba and therefore has probably avoided the quixotic attachment to the island that so many in the U.S. have cultivated, it is still noteworthy that he did not photograph Havana as a place of romanticized longing. Viva, after all, is a film about longing, mutual distrust and the tragedy of insurmountable distance between two people whose very proximity should guarantee a positive relationship. In other words, it is an allegory for U.S.-Cuba relations, but the film does not explore this. How much more timely could it have been, given the recent lifting of the travel ban?
The camera’s lack of curiosity with Havana belies a larger issue with the film. Namely, it is not visually interesting. The camera rarely moves; there are few long takes, and no individual frames stand out as particularly memorable or novel. Viva’s cinematography is functional but nothing more. Because of the excellent screenplay, the film is able to overcome mediocre photography, but given the visually rich setting and characters, a real opportunity for vivid camerawork existed and was squandered.
Viva is an admirable and needed intervention into a topic of immediate sociocultural importance, though it is doubtful a subtitled film about a gay man will attract the sort of people who are currently oppressing the transgender community. While the narrative is unflinchingly conventional, Jesus and Havana do provide a combination of protagonist and setting heretofore not seen in cinema, giving the film a claim to originality and making it aesthetically worthwhile in addition to being socially relevant.