‘Aviva’ misses steps in dance of the sexes
From Boaz Yakin of “Remember the Titans” and those barking “Max” movies comes “Aviva,” a sexually provocative film in which the two main characters, a woman and a man, are played by four people, a man and a woman for each character, and they are straight, gay, bi, gender fluid. For a while all that fluidity is exhilarating.
Meet Aviva (“Westworld”-ready Zina Zinchenko). She’s a woman and a dancer and she’s from Paris, although she is moving to New York, where “she” is suddenly a good-looking
young man (Or Schraiber), who is in a relationship with another good-looking young man named Eden (Tyler Phillips). Eden is also a woman (Bobbi Jene Smith, who also served as choreographer), who is in love with and in a relationship with the female Aviva and also the male Aviva.
All of the actors are dancers, and when the spirit takes them they break into dance to move the story along, celebrate a wedding or just express their half drunken feelings. Many of the dancers were also members of the Batsheva Dance Company of Tel Aviv, Israel. The dancing is neo-Bob Fosse style and nicely executed. The sex is frequent, athletic, soft core and full frontal with two or three threesomes and one game of BDSM, featuring young and beautiful bodies.
“Aviva” is a relationship movie insofar as beyond dancing the people in the film have relationships and talk about them to the exclusion of everything else.
The dialogue is a torrent of relationship-centered talk that runs the gamut from deliriously happy declarations to angrily unhappy diatribes. Couples are madly in love or bitterly divided and/ or betrayed, sometimes in the flash of a not very convincing moment.
We are told Aviva is a “brilliant” video artist and wish we could see a lot more of this activity on screen. Ditto for more of the kid who plays the preteen Eden (Roman Malenda) romping on Coney Island.
The Edens and Avivas get married so the Avivas can stay in the U.S. Prepare for more flailing limbs and wagging tongues.
“Aviva” resembles John Carney’s 2007 modern classic “Once” in that it uses dance to express feelings and move the story along in the way that Carney’s film uses music in a way that seemed entirely indie-film fresh. While “Once,” although drably heterosexual, has only one couple, it somehow manages to be vastly more engaging that Yakin’s more polymorphous approach. Perhaps that is because the screenplay for “Once” was written by Carney (“Sing Street”), while the screenplay for “Aviva” was written by the guy who co-wrote “Max” and “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.”
Why do I think that half the dialogue was taken verbatim from arguments Yakin had with his ex-wife, music video and film director Alma Ha’rel? When the male Aviva announces that he is going to follow a pair of dancers, who plan to go to the world’s most dangerous places to dance, I must admit I was hoping for a misstep to end the movie.
Cinematography by Arseni Khatchaturan is first-rate. Instrumental music by Israeli musician Asaf Avidan gives the dancing a pounding, if not memorable beat.
Yakin says he took his “double casting” cue from Luis Bunuel’s 1977 effort “That Obscure Object of Desire.”
Is “Aviva” this generation’s “Orlando”? Well, the truth is I didn’t much like “Orlando” either, although I did not want to cover my ears.
(“Aviva” contains simulated sex, full frontal nudity and profanity.)