I was watching this thinking to myself that our main protagonist, the director, really needs to check out Hisayasu Satō or Kōji Wakamatsu for inspiration in making his CATIII film something more than lurid gratification. Then, all of a sudden, a fellow crew member refers the director at the center of our story to pinku cinema as a means of inspiration, a way to hone one's craft as an artist while obfuscating the genre's simple commercial intentions. Anyway, this is a fantastic film full of vitality and heart. It's so inventive, formally audacious, and surprisingly heartfelt, delivering what amounts to a beautiful ode to the communal nature of the creative process. Art vs commerce is a major theme throughout Viva Erotica but it is also merely a jumping-off point. Viva Erotica, at its core, is an affront to artistic orthodoxy, a rejection of this dichotomous ideal that persists between high and low art. Viva Erotica fundamentally recognizes how much economic forces alone often sculpt this fabricated binary, working in conjunction with societal expectations/normative social values that together construct, define, and reinforce this false binary. I think what Viva Erotica manages over its runtime is a deep appreciation for the mutual action of all artists, who together create through collaboration, doing so in a way that never feels contrived but authentically rendered. The struggling artist, confronted by the harsh realities of creating art in an increasingly commercial world that only values material commodities can forge a path through collaboration and a shared artistic vision - Viva Erotica is, at it's core, a deeply optimistic film about the power we can derive from acts of creation. An invigorating experience and frankly, for my money, one of the best films about filmmaking ever made.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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