Viva is Wonderfully Messy and Alive

At once passionately felt and awkwardly hilarious, achingly tender and kinda goofy, Aina Clotet’s Viva (2026) is the kind of mature-woman-in-crisis picture that’s super easy to love. Directing herself in the lead role, the erstwhile Catalan actress is a natural filmmaking talent, unafraid to embrace the messiness of a 40-year-old woman recovering from cancer and diving headfirst into a relationship with a much younger man.

Avoiding clichéd feminist polemic in favour of a nuanced, warts-and-all interrogation of sex and selfhood, this spiky film is a brilliant, standout work, filled with all kinds of juicy, intractable intangibles.

It starts at the doctor’s office, with a close-up of Nora’s breast. Having just recovered from a mastectomy, with her right breast completely removed, she lies on the doctor’s table: vulnerable, half-naked, unsure of the future. Having flirted with the annihilating spectre of death, her life has become a delicate, wondrous thing, begging to be reclaimed in the fullest sense imaginable.

But when the opportunity comes — in the form of lustful text messages from her best friend’s cousin, Max (Marc Soler) — she is immediately thrust into the maelstrom; brimming with conflicting sexual and emotional desires. In the first of many exceptionally well-rendered scenes, the messages appear in the middle of her workplace — quite appropriately, she works in a research lab dedicated to the science of longevity — and the camera pans upside down, capturing her head the wrong way round. The discombulation is phrenetic, visceral and deeply, deeply confusing.

Over and over again, Cliotet’s screenplay, co-written with Valentina Viso, is unafraid to show both Nora’s reburgeoning sexuality and her manifold mixed reactions; concern over the huge age gap between herself and Max, and shame about betraying her boyfriend of ten years, Tom (Naby Dakhli). In a precursor of the frank sexuality to come, she imagines Max has encroached into her lecture hall, briefly excuses herself, and beats herself off in the bathroom. Such frank female sexuality, transgressive in its wantingness, still has the capacity to shock.

Like a modern Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856) or Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1878), Nora is defined by her betrayal of societal norms, yet is so richly characterised that we happily support her in her annihilating desire for pleasure. Thankfully, modern Catalonia, despite the droughts and the warmest winter in years, is more progressive, so Nora has more opportunities to make the most of her conflicting desires — and, beautifully, progress in her scientific career at the same time.

What makes it so entertaining is that it’s exceptionally hard to say, from moment to moment, if Nora’s life is getting an upgrade or falling apart completely. It’s in working through the chaos that Viva feels so alive, showing how major developments in our lives often come with the perilous sense that success is a mere hair trigger from disaster. Scene after scene of shambolic, deeply human moments — especially that laugh-out-loud sex act near the end — make Nora’s pursuit of pleasure a rollercoaster of contradiction.   

I particularly appreciated how Viva drops us into the middle of certain developments and then forces us to play catch-up a little. This approach makes it truly a slice-of-life work, with the actual sense that Nora has had things happen to her before the film starts, and will continue to learn more about herself long after the credits have rolled. She’s probably gonna be OK, and that’s a wonderful thing to think about. Nonetheless, I do have one practical piece of advice for our lovely protagonist: put that phone on silent at work and in the car!