Aviva review – an experimental study of love, sex and gender
Watch the first 60 seconds of this experimental feature from IsraeliAmerican director Boaz Yakin – it’s a love story with plenty of sex and expressionist dancing – and you’ll get a taste of the bizarreness to come. A naked woman sits on a bed and explains to camera that she’s acting in the film. Her name is Bobbi Jene Smith and she’s a dancer and choreographer by trade, not an actor. But given the dancing required by the script, she says, the film-makers have hired dancers to do the acting. Oh, and she’s playing a man.
This is not the last time director Yakin takes a sledgehammer to the fourth wall, and his deeply personal film is deeply exasperating at times, a bit indulgent and at least 20 minutes too long. It’s tells a timeworn tale of a man and woman falling in love only to be confronted with the harsh reality of living together. The woman is Aviva (Zina Zinchenko), a fierce and emotional video artist from Paris. The guy is American, Eden (Tyler Phillips), and their romance begins over email. The scene where the two meet in person is gorgeous: long tracking shots of both dancing through their cities towards each other. The pair’s athleticism and the emotional fluency of their bodies is exhilarating and beautiful.
But the film’s big experiment feels only semi-interesting. The roles of Aviva and Eden are also performed by another two actors, a man and a woman (a little nod possibly to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire). So sometimes Aviva is a balefully sexy guy (Or Schraiber), while Bobbi Jene Smith appears as a female Eden. No one around them seems to notice, and you wonder what Yakin’s film is saying here about gender. When Eden is sulky and withdrawn, his female counterpart arrives on screen to show us his emotionally intuitive side. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but is the point here that differences between the sexes are hardwired? Or that we each have male and female sides? Either way, it feels reductive.
• Aviva is released on 30 April on digital platforms.