Most comedies rely on a certain amount of established tropes: the obsessive best friend, the stereotyped psychotherapist, the randy 20-year-old. Besides offering comfort, this kind of familiarity can function like a reassuring blanket wrapped around such potentially discomforting issues as female sexuality, the Grim Reaper and what it means to be a 40-year-old woman trying to make sense of a messy life. Established Spanish actress Aina Clotet’s “Viva” (given the anodyne English title “Alive”) is all these things, fleshed out by a flawed protagonist faced with the potential recurrence of breast cancer shortly after a partial mastectomy. Clotet — director, co-writer and star — indeed makes Nora “alive,” more than most of the one-dimensional side characters, but whether she succeeds in creating a role compelling enough to balance out the overfamiliarity of well-worn formulas will very much depend on individual affinities.
That it’s been picked up pre-Cannes for French distribution by Haut et Court is a good sign that the target demographic will coalesce around Nora’s journey, and such faith is almost certainly justified. Few comedies are so upfront about mastectomy scars (both physical and emotional), and Clotet isn’t afraid to write Nora into situations that don’t reflect well on her character. Let’s face it, life is full of foolish decisions. Yet “Viva” is constrained by just how predictable so many of the characterizations are. The final shot, meant to feel liberating and, yes, Alive!, is so easy and pat that it intensifies certain niggling dissatisfactions popping up throughout the running time.
From its opening shot, of a breast being compressed for a mammogram, it’s clear Clotet wants to sweep away all the taboos surrounding diseased breasts and unsettle the male gaze. (“Ah,” some may say, “the DP is a man.” But isn’t it time we moved beyond binary assumptions of who wields “the gaze?”) Nora is back for a check-up at the oncologist, yet when the doctor tells her that her scans reveal a small growth in the healthy breast, she refuses a biopsy and for the next 110 minutes does everything she can to avoid dealing with what might be growing in her body.
If we haven’t already figured out that Nora feels trapped in her life, there’s the scene after, in which long strips of fly paper, spotted with captive prey, dangle around the home she shares with her eco-friendly partner Tom (Naby Dakhli). A heatwave and drought aren’t the only things causing pheromones to spike: There are also the sexts from 20-year-old Max (It-boy Marc Soler), the cousin of her best friend Ari (Zaira Pérez). Persistence pays off in a very well-played scene with Nora nervously revealing her mastectomy scar to the unruffled Max — viva Gen Z!
This vulnerability regarding her altered body forms the film’s strong suit, countering her troubled relationship with her new asymmetry through embracing her inner MILF, courtesy of an objectified young hottie unfazed by what much of the world might call her recently acquired imperfections: We’ve come a long way from the 1978 TV movie “First, You Cry.” Here’s where “Viva” comes alive, fleshed out by Clotet and Soler as an irresponsible adult paired with a libidinous puppy, having sex next to a greasy box of cold pizza. Nora’s at a crossroads, knowing the stability of Tom, the man who stood by her when cancer took its toll, is the safe option. But with mortality lurking in the background, she has a need to shake things up, no matter how reckless it may seem.
Less successful are the other situations she gets into, all of which feel unremarkably derivative. There’s her best friend Ari — her only friend, it seems — who’s pregnant and tediously obsessive; her kooky but loving shrink mom Sònia (Lloll Bertran); her new, severe co-worker Zeymey (Sau-Ching Wong), threatening to take her position. Even making Nora a researcher in cellular aging feels too convenient, as if Clotet and her co-writer Valentina Viso felt they needed to overcompensate for Nora’s messiness by making everything else too tidy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a montage of snapshots during which the characters recount everything, spoon-feeding us information that should either be implied or not there at all.
It’s especially disappointing given that Clotet gives Nora grit, unafraid not only to expose her body but her self-destructive humanity. A playful, then violent mud fight with Max is skillfully handled and Clotet proves that she has strengths behind as well as in front of the camera. Yet being alive means more than energetically embracing the moment. For a comedy designed around something so serious, it also requires believable relationships embodied by characters of equal depth.
