Raising Victor Vargas

I usually feel a strong affinity for films which are set in my home cities – Mona Lisa, say, or anything by Woody Allen. New York has way, way more than its fair share of indy filmmakers, so a lot of low-budget films end up being set here. The wonderful Sunshine Cinema specialises in such films: it's where I saw 13 Conversations About One Thing, Roger Dodger, and Tadpole. Finally, last night, I got around to seeing Raising Victor Vargas there, as well.

Raising Victor Vargas is a world apart from the privileged life portrayed in Igby Goes Down etc. It's set in what all the film reviews insist on calling the Lower East Side, although nearly all of it takes place north of Houston Street. Still, the moniker is fair: what we're seeing is Loisaida Avenue, not Avenue C. (For those of you who don't live here, they're physically the same, but conceptually very different: the former is old-school Hispanic; the latter new-school yuppie.) The big divide in this (my) neck of the woods these days is not Houston Street so much as it is disposable income: there are many poor families living on welfare and clipping supermarket coupons, as well as bars with $2,000 bottles of champagne and a new hotel which will charge up to $2,500 a night.

But there are no yuppies in Raising Victor Vargas, there is no class war. Our eponymous hero lives in a cramped apartment in the projects, sharing his bedroom with his sister and his bed with his brother, but there's no resentment in this film, no indication that he's living on what is probably the richest island in the world. Victor's the kind of kid who rejoices at finding a quarter on the street, but he would never claim abject poverty the way that much better-off LES writers do.

The lack of drugs or guns or money issues in this film is entirely deliberate. In an interview with Peter Sollett, the director, Bill Chambers notes that "the milieu is all but incidental (Sollett picked the film's central location based on the Latino community's enthusiastic response to an open casting call)". It's a little bit weird to see a film which was entirely shot on location in Manhattan but which has no real New York feeling to it: the camera generally stays low to the ground, concentrating on the characters, who in turn never stray from their own small neighborhood. Even I, who have lived here for over six years, had difficulty pinpointing most of the locations. If it wasn't for the occasional rooftop shot with the Empire State Building in the background, most people would never know the film was shot here at all.

Raising Victor Vargas, then, is not about Latino life on the Lower East Side, any more than The Wizard of Oz is about life on a Kansas farm. It's a much more universal film, which will appeal to anybody who's ever lived through the years between 11 and 18. School's out for the summer, and the New York heat is prompting the kids to start taking their clothes off. These aren't the funnysexysmartcocky kids of Hollywood teen comedies, either. They're real in a way which makes you realise just how fake most US films are when dealing with adolescents. The casual cruelties, the weight obsesssions, the nervous fumblings towards wanted-and-feared sex: this film makes you remember just what it was like when you were a kid.

Credit must go to Smollett, but not for his writing chops: rather, he simply took kids off the street, pointed a camera at them, and trusted them so much that they ended up giving him some amazing scenes. "Victor suggesting to Nino that the way they get the attention of a girl is by licking their lips in a sexy way or the argument over who broke the telephone – I mean, you can't write that stuff," he says in the interview. "You just sort of have to let them go at each other and try to cut it." Using untrained actors is a bold move, but trusting their acting abilities so much that you just let them improvise the scenes – that takes real daring, and paid off handsomely in this case.

What's most heartening is that this film, like Bend It Like Beckham, seems to be taking off. It's already grossed more than its budget, and has increased the number of screens it's showing on – along with its weekend gross – every week since its release at the end of March. We're entering the braindead summer zone now, with X2, Daddy Day Care and their ilk, so Raising Victor Vargas should have a chance of positioning itself as a good film for the over-25 set. It's funny, it's touching, it's immensely likeable, and it's even American, to boot. It's obviously a budget film: the titles and sountrack leave quite a lot to be desired, for instance. But Sollett managed to find the money to shoot on film, which makes it look professional – unlike most films which are shot on DV.

All the same, it does seem that the good films these days are all very short on ambition: Raising Victor Vargas, for instance, is a small-scale family drama which, if anything, is proud of the fact that it has no larger message. What I long to see is a smaller, intelligent film which aspires to greatness: something along the lines of Breaking the Waves, say. It seems to me that American independent filmmakers are a bit like British novelists, unable to think big. Why let Hollywood and pretentious Europeans have a monopoly on hubristic excess?

Posted by Felix at 15:01 EST