AVIVA Review — Life, Choreographed

Editor’s Note:  Read related BATSHEVA Dance stories here.

A group of friends in a bar try to balance beer glasses on their heads—it’s graceful, rather than goofy. Two of them shake hands and pull each other in for a one armed hug—in rhythm. Eventually, without noticing where it began—they dance.

Boaz Yakin’s new dance film Aviva tells the story of Aviva and Eden.  They are introduced over email via a mutual friend. Eden lives in New York. Aviva lives in Paris, but soon moves to New York to give their relationship an in-person try. They have sex, they fight, they break up, they get back together. Yet in this movie, plot takes a backseat.  

Each central character is played by two separate actor/dancers: one male, one female. In some scenes, only one Aviva or Eden is present; in others, an argument between them is presented as a four-way shouting match. What’s at stake is not so much their relationship with each other as their relationships with themselves.  

Interspersed with all of this, weaving its way into every corner, is dance. Sometimes it’s a romantic duet, sometimes a large group number in a bar, sometimes just a character’s grounded way of running down a street. The film isn’t shy about inserting dance purely for the beauty of it: at one point a group of young boys perform a rap together on a city street before dancing through a subway car, pulling passengers into their movement. We never see these boys again.  

AVIVA Questions Identity 

The film begins with a woman, nude on a bed, announcing that though she is a dancer and choreographer in real life, here she will be playing a man. Later, when describing the realities of an online relationship, Eden describes how he and Aviva’s virtual personalities differ from their in-person ones. Male-Eden (Tyler Phillips) and female-Eden (Bobbi Jene Smith) chase after different women, feeling attracted to different things, and arguing about how only female-Eden is ever able to bring these women to orgasm.  

Since the actors are dancers, and not, in fact, trained actors, their style of line delivery may at times feel overwrought. Yet you too may decide this is not a fault—in fact, it fits perfectly with the film’s handling of identity in general. Everyone is torn between multiple roles—dancer/actor, email-writer/conversationalist, man/woman—and yet we never get the sense that one of these roles is more real than another. Never has the phrase Just be yourself, felt more useless, for if each of us has multiple selves, how are we to choose between them?

Viewers should be prepared for a lot of sex—threesomes, BDSM, mid-coital conversations about the likelihood of orgasm, and approximately a gazillion penises. Aviva is not a movie for children. Even so, this writer did not find the nudity gratuitous, and instead saw it as a frank acceptance of the bodily realities of life.  

Aviva is innovative, tonally varied, and visually stunning enough that any viewer—excepting, of course, those under the age of 18—is likely to find something in it to enjoy. For those with a passion for dance, however, it’s a must-see.  

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 

Director: Boaz Yakin
Producer: Carlos Zozaya
Eden/Woman: Bobbi Jene Smith
Eden/Man: Tyler Phillips
Aviva/Woman: Zina Zinchenko
Aviva/Man: Or Schraiber 

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For more information and to view this film, visit the Outsider Pictures page for AVIVA.  (And save with Promo Code $2offAVIVA.) 

Images courtesy of Outsider Pictures. 

 

Fiona Warnick
Fiona Warnick

About the Author: Fiona Warnick

Fiona Warnick is a Creative Writing major at Oberlin College.  She has dabbled in ballet and theater, and speaks semi-passable French.  Born and raised near Amherst, Massachusetts, she enjoys reading middle grade fiction and hiking in her spare time.  She is trying to get better at Scrabble.

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