It’s tough to find critical and commercial success in Hollywood—and even tougher to sacrifice it to follow one’s unconventional and uncommercial artistic instincts. Nonetheless, that’s precisely what Remember the Titans director Boaz Yakin has done with Aviva, a startlingly unique and inspired work (in virtual theatrical release June 12) that combines song, dance, and Buñuelian devices to depict a romance’s tumultuous rise, fall and rebirth, as well as its participants’ personal attempts to reconcile the warring factions within themselves.
A far cry from Yakin’s mainstream output—which includes Fresh and A Price Above Rubies (which he helmed), and Now You See Me and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (which he penned)—Aviva is a semi-autobiographical love story that reveals its self-conscious modus operandi from the get-go. On a bed, naked Bobbi Jene Smith (the subject of the 2017 documentary Bobbi Jene) informs the audience that she’s a dancer and choreographer, hired to be an actress, reading words written by others in front of cameras, for a performance as a male character named Eden, who’s also played by Tyler Phillips—who suddenly materializes in her place on the same bed, sans clothes. We then see Aviva (Zina Zinchenko), a redheaded woman at a bathroom mirror. She admits that she didn’t know these cameras would be present when she first met Eden via Nissan (John Mastrojohn)—a guy introduced, like so many supporting figures, via a full-frontal nude portrait—whom she explains set her up with Eden even though he lived in New York City and she resided in Paris.
An email pen-pal relationship ensues, and as the two describe their correspondence in narration—with Smith providing Eden’s inner voice—the duo engage in detached, solo modern dances through their respective environments. In sunshiny light, Aviva’s movements are warm and inviting; in bluish-grey hues, Eden’s are tormented and searching. Having already had his leads break the fourth wall, Yakin brings the two together first cinematically through juxtaposed imagery, and then in physical reality, only to subsequently send Aviva racing down a rabbit hole of memories from the pair’s childhood, full of angry and sexualized experiences that will eventually speak—silently, but powerfully—to the tangled emotional hang-ups plaguing them in adulthood.
It’s a delirious and assured start to the film, as Yakin adroitly blends disparate elements. The past and the present, cinema and dance, and the masculine and the feminine are all entangled in Aviva, which soon introduces Aviva’s male half, embodied by Or Schraiber, thereby creating a scenario in which Aviva and Eden are sometimes played by a man or a woman, if not both at once. As the couple moves from long-distance courtship to NYC-situated domesticity and marriage, all four actors occasionally inhabit the same space, interacting with each other in ways that are alternately loving, hostile and carnal—replete with Eden and Aviva’s sex presented in various heterosexual/homosexual permutations. It’s a trick out of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, designed here to express the protagonists’ male/female aspects, and the way in which they vie for dominance at different moments, trade off taking control during particular situations, and strive to achieve reconciliation.
As Eden is a fictional stand-in for Yakin, Aviva focuses more of its attention on his fractious inner life. Phillips’ Eden is sullen, insecure and often self-destructive, while Smith’s Eden is open, sensitive and temperate. Such duality exists within Zinchenko and Schraiber’s Aviva as well, and the writer/director suggests his characters’ sometimes harmonious, sometimes warring dimensions in free-flowing sequences that synthesize, and separate, at the drop of a hat. Prolonged dance interludes further evoke Eden and Aviva’s emotional turmoil, as do first-person addresses to the audience and cutaways to flashbacks—one in which young Eden discovers that a boy he’s playing with in a park is actually a girl; another in which adolescent Eden and his two friends rap their way to Coney Island—that deepen our understanding of their conflicted gender identity. Occasionally recalling a modern dance-infused riff on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the film is a delirious swirl of internal and external joy, confusion and discord.
Aviva’s narrative momentum isn’t always up to par with its stylistic daring; Eden and Aviva’s on-again, off-again dynamic sometimes loses a bit of stream, no matter the thrilling avant-garde means by which Yakin recounts their ups and downs. Even during its slower passages, however, the director captures an intensely intimate sense of what’s driving his protagonists into each other’s arms, or into the arms of others, or to far-off locales where they can reassess who they are, what they want, and where they’re headed. He recognizes and embraces the idea that the self is a multifaceted entity, and extends that notion to art itself, melding song, dance and cinema in a way that feels all the more natural, and exciting, for being self-aware—epitomized by a Times Square scene in which Phillips’ Eden states that he’s thinking about breaking into a musical number, only to admit that such occurrences generally feel false to him in movies, so he’s bailing on it.
Aviva’s fluid gender characterizations are mirrored by its style. Its cinematography is lithe and silky and its editing is graceful and surprising, creating cohesion even amidst chaos. Yakin establishes his storytelling conceit so effectively that, in his film’s latter half, he’s able to take even greater risks, pairing his four main actors in various complex combinations, and stranding them in isolation, as when Smith’s Eden races around an abandoned warehouse room, recounting a frantic journey as we hear Phillips’ Eden (via narration) calling Aviva on the phone in order to initiate a reunion. The result is akin to watching a relationship come together and fall apart—fervently, foolishly, clumsily—both from a remove and from within.
“Everything is going to change,” worries Eden toward film’s end, to which Aviva replies “Everything is always changing.” That’s certainly true of Aviva, an ever-mutating experimental drama that, in both narrative and formal terms, is about division and the desire for unity—and which never feels anything less than fully, breathtakingly alive.
