Bulgarian-born Maya Vitkova’s ambitious directorial debut Viktoria is a sprawling character study of three generations of women. The film spans nearly two decades and runs for nearly three hours along multiple tones, genres and styles. While the film’s length works against it, this is the work of a promising young director.
We meet Boryana (Irmena Chichikova) in 1979, trapped in communist Bulgaria and struggling with her mute mother, Dima (Mariana Krumova) and her husband Ivan (Dimo Dimov), who desperately wants a daughter. Boryana doesn’t want to bear a child, let alone raise one in this environment, and when she becomes pregnant she tries various methods to end her pregnancy. But she eventually gives birth to Viktoria, born with no belly button and no umbilical cord.
Bulgaria’s socialist regime uses the genetic abnormality as a symbol for a theoretical future where pregnant women can join the labor force and babies are grown independent of the womb. Viktoria is dubbed the baby of the century and treated like a princess, leaving her parents trapped inside the country.
Ten years later, the regime having fallen apart, nine-year old Viktoria (Daria Vitkova) is alone in the world, having never been emotionally attached to her mother, who further detaches herself from her role as mother and wife. After several more years, a teenaged Viktoria (Kalina Vitkova) lives with her mother in the kind of silent, brooding relationship that Boryana shared with her own mother at the start of the film. The teen Viktoria has forged a bond with Dima, who’s now in the final years of her life, and the three women reach a catharsis with their relationships to each other.
This familial through line gives the film its heart and structure, but there’s a lot more weaved into the narrative—perhaps too much. The socioeconomic landscape that prominently figures into it doesn’t quite mesh with the otherwise sullen exploration of womanhood at the film’s core. It flexes its muscles as a sharp political allegory with plenty of wry laughs; Viktoria’s absurd birthday party plays like a Wes Anderson Kodak commercial from hell. But the movie really hits its marks as an idiosyncratic family drama.
Subtle acting helps as moments of quiet expression drown out the more satirical elements of the film. The cast avails themselves admirably, especially Chichikova, whose performance as Boryana is a tour-de-force that’s brave, raw and un-self-conscious. Seeing events unfold in the reflection of her sunken eyes casts a rueful pall over every scene.
Viktoria is visually stunning, taking a straightforwardly framed approach and constantly reworking it for more surreal aims. Moments of disquiet are marked by striking images, like the dense globules of rain water that bond to the thicket of Boryana’s hair, or a postcard of Venice that subtly transforms into the enticing locale itself. Sound design, too, is well employed to imply emotional dissonance. During Boryana’s pregnancy, several shots cut into the embryo with a muffled soundtrack, as the outside world slowly seeps into the baby’s existence. Once she’s born, her shrieking cries disrupts the film’s plaintive piano scores to evoke the trials of postpartum depression.
If Viktoria has a weak point, it’s the run time. The glacial pace suits the overarching mother/daughter relationships just fine, but as other elements are treated with the same patient scope, every sequence begins to feel like an epoch. Still, Vitkova, in a beautifully realized debut, has distilled a very personal story into something universal.
