The performers convey these defining traits effortlessly, even as Yakin’s screenplay unnecessarily emphasizes them, repeating certain points while neglecting other aspects of the duo’s lives. An especially incisive exchange of dialogue touches on the way the written word can instill a false sense of intimacy.Įden has a tendency toward sadness, withdrawal and self-pity, while Aviva is self-confident, open and direct. Things naturally become more complicated once they’re both in New York. The new-love feeling of possibility and discovery between Aviva and Eden is beautifully captured in long tracking shocks of each of them dancing through city streets, among but apart from the other pedestrians, their moves rhyming across the miles. As a further aside, Zinchenko’s character bears a passing resemblance, coiffure-wise, to filmmaker Alma Har’el, Yakin’s ex-wife and DP for the Aviva‘s Los Angeles unit.) (The Russia-born Zinchenko’s accent isn’t French, as she points out in one of several fourth-wall-breaking asides addressing the artifice of moviemaking - welcome bursts of humor amid the emotional intensity. The story begins as a long-distance correspondence - an email version of “an old-fashioned letter-writing romance” - between New Yorker Eden and Parisian Aviva. This quartet of selves appear in varying configurations, making for tantalizing explorations of flesh and identity, complete with four-way living-room arguments and metaphorical bedroom threesomes. Inspired in part by the double casting of the lead character in Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, the writer-director uses a similar approach to trace the highs and lows of a relationship between a man, Eden (Tyler Phillips), and a woman, Aviva (Zina Zinchenko): They’re played as well by another pair of performers, choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith (as the female aspect of Eden) and Or Schraiber (the male Aviva). The movie finds Yakin ( Fresh, Remember the Titans) freed from formula. Their gazes are direct, their self-confident nakedness a rebuke, perhaps, or a happy challenge to run-of-the-mill repression, setting the tone for the emotional and physical writhing that lies ahead. But the first bodies we see in Boaz Yakin‘s atypically experimental film are defiantly still. ![]() ![]() There are plenty of bodies in motion, clothed and not, in Aviva, a love story propelled by inventive dance sequences and uninhibited sex.
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