Overall Rating
  Awesome: 68%
Worth A Look: 24%
Average: 8%
Pretty Bad: 0%
Total Crap: 0%
5 reviews, 45 user ratings
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| Raising Victor Vargas |
by R. Swan
"This teen drama out-paces its barrio-verite antecedents"
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I like Raising Victor Vargas for the same reason that I liked Junot Diaz’s Drown, my first high school boyfriend, and the sexy parts of Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (I think all of these examples involve a guy wacking off and being confused about his identity). Because the film is suffused a kind of operatic teenage-boy angst, you feel like you’ve stepped into a young adult novel about machismo and the immigrant experience. But the characters’ identities get displaced into these little worldly symbols, like a Chinese hieroglyphic tattoo, a lipstick stain on the rim of a glass, or one of those plastic homeboy figurines you can buy from gumball machines.Aesthetically, the film is super-pared down, bearing the proper I’m-an-indy-made-on-a-shoestring-budget creds. "Naked" might be an apt descriptive term –and I’m not just talking sweaty, bare-chested teenage boys, though there’s a lot of that too. I’m talking love scenes without the extra-diagetic music, lighting, or showboaty camera techniques that are supposed to steer our emotions. What’s more, the actors are real-life maladjusted youth with heavy New York accents, culled from a barrio in Brooklyn are Queens. Thus director Peter Sollett follows the neo-realist heels of Bunuel’s Los Olvidados and Meirelles’ City of God. Hand-held cameras make the awkward courtship scenes seem more jagged and more intimate, so you really feel like a dirty voyeur peering into the secret lives of Catholic teens.
But that’s part of the film’s charm. Like the similar-themed Real Women Have Curves, it’s a movie about hormones colliding with an entrenched value system. Altagracia Guzman is convincingly cute and pissy as the repressive, Old World Catholic grandmother who upbraids Victor (Victor Rasuk) while indulging his brown-nosey younger brother (Silvestre Rasuk). As much as we’re rooting for Victor -who, after all, is infectious as the barrio’s self-described Don Juanito- we can’t hate on the brother too much. In one scene he asks Victor how to approach girls, and Victor him tells him to lick his lips –chicks won’t go for chapped dudes. You might call it a quirky fraternal reconciliation without the sappy "Just be yourself, Beav," that we’d expect from a conventional feel-gooder.
I’ve got a bone to pick with Bitchslapper Chris Parry for comparing Raising Victor Vargas to the raunchier Y Tu Mama Tambien and gross-out docu-drama Kids, even if said comparison was meant to be flattering. To be fair, all of the philandering protagonists in these films have guy-angst in spades, and envision themselves -as Parry astutely notes- as "Lotharios" of the hood. But Victor has the cagey, misunderstood, sensitive guy qualities of antecedents like Holden Caulfield, distinguishing him from wacked-out characters like Telly, Tenoch, and Julio --who are the kind of kids you want to beat up, using their parents as billy clubs. Granted,Victor’s love interest, Judi, has the same disarmingly virginal aspect of Jennie from Kids and the same femme-fatal-ish quality of Luisa from Y Tu Mama Tambien, but she’s no easy lay.It’s most accurate to situate Raising Victor Vargas in the burgeoning genre of cultural-diaspora flicks with teen protagonists --which includes Bend it Like Beckham and the aforementioned Real Women Have Curves. Neither full-fledged chick flick nor pure verite, Vargas manages to get beyond the theme of teen deflowering and delve into all issues identity-related. A lesser director might have fallen back on schmaltzy family drama or angsty-guy navel-gazing, but Sollet resists these temptations. Unlike that ungainly turmoil called "adolescence," Vargas has a kind of spare radiance that carries throughout.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6875&reviewer=336
originally posted: 04/30/03 09:17:15
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2003 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Philadelphia Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Philadelphia Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Sydney Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Sydney Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Brisbane Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Brisbane Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
28-Mar-2003 (R)
DVD: 24-Aug-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
23-Oct-2003
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