Aina Clotet: "Desire and sex are part of life and we must claim it"
The actress premieres 'Viva', her first feature film as director, at the Cannes Critics' Week
Special correspondent to CannesIn the first scene of Viva, Aina Clotet’s opera prima as a director, which she also stars in, the actress appears uncomfortable and naked in the hospital, where the character she plays is undergoing the final test to conclude her breast cancer treatment. The close-up of the mastectomy scar is the first sign that Clotet is going head-on in this film about the intense desire to live of Nora, a scientific researcher who, after seeing death up close, feels the need to shake up her life and, as you have to start somewhere, she cheats on her husband with a much younger man with a sculpted body.
“I wanted to explore the fear of death, but contrasted with the bonds that romantic love generates and the heteropatriarchal structures we have inherited about what a woman should be at a certain age”, explains Clotet from the private beach of the Critics' Week, the parallel section of the Cannes Film Festival where the film premiered this Thursday. “I am amazed at how we have been received, they only have seven films in competition and they take great care of them”, says the director, for whom Cannes brings luck: in 2024 she won the award for best actress at the Canneseries festival for This is Not Sweden. And competing in the Semaine has already brought her good news: Viva will premiere in France in October.
In Viva, Clotet portrays the protagonist’s romantic adventure with a tone very close to comedy, showing frankly and humorously how the sexual attraction to the young man disrupts Nora’s balance and seeking friction between the character’s self-imposed prejudices and the youthful lightness of her lover, a dancer who lives in the moment and without plans for the future. The camera's gaze is very physical and direct, because sex has great narrative weight in Nora's personal journey. “I wanted to show women's sexual desire, and in this sense it was important to show the emotional and physical mark of the illness –explains Clotet–. And also to reclaim that this different body had an opportunity to be loved and desired. Deep down, it's like a second loss of virginity, a reappropriation of one's own body”.
Interpretive challenge
Aina Clotet, the screenwriter and director, didn't make things easy for Aina Clotet, the actress, who to portray a woman who had just lost a breast had to spend two hours every day “pressing her breast to put on the prosthesis”, a “very laborious” job in which the director, as a good daughter of scientists, thoroughly researched the type of mastectomy and reconstruction that Nora undergoes to “take care of every last detail”. Furthermore, Clotet had to face some of the most sexual and explicit scenes of her career since her film debut, Joves, she was the victim of a rape. “There were moments when I thought: ‘Oh my, at what point did I write this’ – she admits –. I have never been a person particularly interested in showing myself naked in cinema, and when something didn't seem right to me, I said: ‘This is not happening’. But I felt it was necessary to shoot these scenes. After all, desire and sex are part of life and we must claim them”.
For Nora, the affair with the young lover will take an emotional toll, especially regarding her marriage to Tom, who according to Clotet “is a fantastic guy who loves her and has taken great care of her, but with whom she feels she has buried herself alive”. Clotet was already exploring couple relationships in the series the series This Is Not Sweden, but here she does it more deeply and directly. “Deep down, it’s about thinking about where we relate to the other from, whether it's from the desire to be with someone freely – she explains –. It is important to be well with oneself to generate quality bonds, but Nora, especially at the beginning, is a character dominated by the fear of not being alone”. In summary, it was about reflecting on the always complicated art of loving well. “Sometimes we trap ourselves and it is difficult to generate healthy relationships from the need to be saved”, she says.
Despite the happiness of having debuted as a director with Viva, Clotet has no intention of parking her acting career, which continues to be one of her priorities. For her, she explains, acting is the space in which she has grown and creatively developed. “I would love to continue acting under the direction of other directors on projects that would be a challenge and take me to different places – she says –. I also really like directing and I hope to be able to maintain both careers. In the end, the type of cinema I want to make requires a lot of time and dedication, so I won't make a film every year. And in the meantime, I hope I can participate as an actress in projects that nourish me”.
Viva, the only Catalan film in this edition of Cannes in its original Catalan version, will arrive in our cinemas on June 19. But it was about to be released with another title: Oh Nora. The culprit for the change of title was, by the way, a filmmaker whom Clotet greatly admires: Sean Baker. “Oh Nora falls at the same time as Anora appears – reveals the director –. At first I said: ‘It’s okay, maybe it will pass without fanfare’. But when it triumphed at the Oscars, we started looking for alternative titles, and a communication agency in Madrid proposed Viva, which I like even more now, because it conveys the protagonist's feelings very well”.
