Aina Clotet celebrates life to make peace with the idea of death

The first feature film as a director by Aina Clotet, Viva, begins with an image in which many women recognize themselves, especially those over 50, but which is not often visible in audiovisuals: a close-up of the protagonist Nora's flattened breast as she undergoes a mammogram. This unusual representation of the female body announces the filmmaker's cinematic positioning regarding two concerns that run through Viva. The first, the direct and unvarnished focus on Nora's medical situation, who has just overcome breast cancer with a mastectomy included, but still lives awaiting a possible relapse. In fact, the film takes place in the following weeks, while she awaits the results of this initial check-up. This temporal arc places the film in direct affiliation with Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 to 7 (1962), in which the protagonist confronted a similar scenario and the same process of rediscovering herself. The second concern anticipated by this opening scene is the uninhibited relationship with her own body expressed by the character, embodied by Aina Clotet herself.

Despite the realistic approach to the cancer experience, Clotet and her co-screenwriter Valentina Viso (also a regular collaborator of Mar Coll) have set the film in a near-future Catalonia where droughts are widespread and water scarcity has become structural. A scenario on the brink of collapse that universalizes Nora's individual feeling about her own situation: suffocation in the face of an uncertain future and the urgent need to cling to life. Because, despite being in a very stable stage of life (her attractive husband is aware of her situation and takes care of her; she works in a laboratory under her father's protection...), Nora begins an affair with a younger man and asks her father to favor her professional career.

Clotet presents a character who feels surrounded by the presence of death (her possible relapse, but also visits to her grandmother in the residence and conversations with her best friend who lost a child) and reacts by surrendering to the life drive. Clotet's theatrical training as an actress favors her performance: the physical and emotional surrender to the character exudes an intensity that is not common on our screens. Also interesting are some actor choices to whom she places in unusual roles: Lloll Bertran plays the wealthy (and blonde) mother of the protagonist (although she doesn't quite hit the right register, far from parody) and a Catalan-speaking Guillermo Toledo takes on the role of the prestigious doctor father.

On the other hand, Clotet and Viso reprise the main attraction of the series they created together, Això no és Suècia (2023), the ability to hybridize drama and comedy and incorporate moments close to self-parody. Here too, they infiltrate unexpected humor into a situation, the experience of cancer, linked to drama. To the point that the best sequence in the film is an intimate encounter between the protagonist couple that culminates in an uncomfortable and very physical situation, in which you don't know whether to laugh or cry. And this demonstrates a commendable willingness to take risks on Clotet's part. In her commitment to performances and the script, the director seems to have neglected the staging, which is resolved in a more functional and routine way. She compensates for this with the revelation award she received at Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival, a recognition that should boost the film's international career.