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.
