Ana and Vitória

Buckle up folks, this is gonna be a long review. I was NOT prepared for Ana and Vitória. This is a fascinating, baffling and very bad movie. Sure, I’ve seen bad WLW movies before. Lots of them! What’s new here is the kind of bad. Ana and Vitória is a wildly inauthentic, corporate sellout of a movie. That makes it pretty unique among a pantheon of bad WLW films.

Ana and Vitória is a biopic musical about the Brazilian musical duo, AnaVitória. The women play themselves in this fictional version of their rise to fame. Though the film generally relegates their actual rise to badly edited montage segments. The focus instead is on interpersonal drama. The first act of the film is a house party where the girls initially meet. Ana is openly a lesbian who is in love with being in love with people. Vitória is more cynical and also more heterosexual. Following an aforementioned shit montage where they get a signing deal, the rest of the movie follows the early days of their success. They struggle somewhat with questions of their public image but mostly just tepid relationship drama.

To fully understand how and why Ana and Vitória exists, there’s cultural references I don’t have. I did do my best to research though but was still left absolutely baffled that this movie exists. AnaVitória are a pop-folk duo who I guess appeal to the youths. Their major strength seems to be their song writing and relatable lyrics. They also received flack after their first album as their following efforts felt more corporate and sell-out. I can’t imagine this movie helped that belief. I’ve tried to figure out an English-language comparison and the best I can come up with is that this is like that American Idol movie, From Justin to Kelly except if it started Haim.

The lack of authenticity is a huge problem for the film. Ana and Vitória play themselves in their pretty recent past. However, these fictional versions of themselves are beyond shallow. They’re not credited as writers in the film and you can tell. They open their mouths and the words that come out were clearly written for them. Was there never any discussion of having the women at least rewrite their dialogue? Their main draw as artists is their song-writing and personal expression. The writer/director of the film is a 30 year old man. Honestly, I’m surprised how young he is. Everything about this feels like it was made by a boomer.

The boomer energy mainly comes from the way the film uses social media. It is both constant and weirdly non-integrated into the film. The film correctly understands that young people use social media constantly. However, it doesn’t know how to show this. Social media use is never integrated naturally into a scene. Instead, it stops a scene in its tracks so that a character can post to Instagram. There are lots of modern films that really integrate this aspect of modern existence into the film. And and Vitória isn’t one of them. Its use of social media feels like something to check off a list of necessary elements for this non-creative, corporate film.

The corporate element is what is really fascinating here. Bad or good, WLW films are generally labours of love. Or, at least, lust. Because generally, WLW films aren’t mainstream it means that bad or good, you do see an uncompromising artistic vision from a creator with a story inspiration. The inspiration for Ana and Vitória is not that. This movie exists to promote a product. It doesn’t care about being original, good, creative or honest. This is a soulless venture. It was very much designed by a committee of overseers whose focus was maximizing profit not on the movie itself but on AnaVitória as a product. Nobody showed up to this movie who actually cared if it was “good.”

I won’t deny that the very corporate nature of Ana and Vitória does represent a huge step forward. The film spends a great deal of time focusing on the queerness of both characters. They sing love songs about other women and both engage in relationships with women during the film. It’s one of the main focuses of the film and feels at least borderline exploitative. But what progress! It is honestly exciting to see a film with a young, mainstream audience in mind use queerness as a selling point. The debate of the commodification of queerness isn’t new and is a discussion worth having. But we shouldn’t ignore the fact that this very discussion shows a lot of societal progress.

One thing that did also impact my enjoyment of the film was the subtitles. I watched the film on Netflix which is generally great for subtitles. Not so for this movie. Whoever captioned this thing was hungover. The subtitles are overtly literal translations. So turns of phrase are often awkward or downright grammatically incorrect. There’s even numerous typos. My favourite is during a conversation on sexuality where the word “straight” is misspelled multiple times. Will the heterophobia never cease? In some ways, maybe it’s good that the subtitles were so overtly bad. It made it abundantly clear that I was definitely losing something in translation.

This review is already way too long but I want to touch on one final point. In the first act, Ana meets a girl named Cecília at a house party. They sneak away to hook up. In the bedroom, once they’ve set the mood lighting, Cecília tells Ana she’s going to teach her a game. Seductively, Cecília explains the rules: the only rule is every time you think of the game, you lose it. I nearly flew into the sun. Is this 2018 movie about adult characters actually referencing staple of my childhood circa 2005, The Game? I’ll be charitable and say maybe it took over a decade for The Game to spread that far south. But even then, The Game should never be part of a seduction scene!

I found Ana and Vitória absolutely fascinating. I don’t understand who the audience for this movie was. Who was asking for an overtly corporate film about up and coming queer singer songwriters? This is a really unique sort of bad WLW movie. This review could have easily been twice as long. Every moment of this film, every choice is fascinating, baffling and shitty in equal measure.

Overall rating: 3.5/10

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