She
drinks Coca-Cola and uses a Statue of Liberty cigarette lighter. Obviously,
Boryana’s heart is not in Bulgaria’s glorious effort to build Socialism. It is
in Venice. Unfortunately, her unplanned pregnancy will stymie her secret
immigration plans. It is one reason why a Cold War rages between mother and
daughter in Maya Vitkova’s Viktoria,
which screens at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Life
in late 1970’s Bulgaria is pretty depressed and dehumanized. Even a trip to the
OBGYN is a humiliating experience, conducted in an examination room with
windows open for any passerby to observe. Boryana previously used traditional
methods to induce miscarriage (a lot of jumping and the like), but to no avail
this time.
In
addition to putting the nix on Venice, the infant Viktoria perversely becomes a
propaganda tool for the state. Not only
was she born on Victory Day, she has no navel. Therefore, she is a portent of
the new Socialist man of the future. No longer must women take time away from
their labor for the sake of childbirth, because babies like Viktoria will
surely be incubated outside their mothers.
When
it comes to entitled little monsters, none can match a Communist princess. A
personal favorite of Bulgarian Party secretary Todor Zhivkov, Viktoria is
chauffeured to school each day, where she is given carte blanche to bully her
teachers and peers alike. She even has a red phone connection direct to
Zhivkov. Then one day in 1989, she becomes an ordinary kid, who nobody likes.
Despite
the surreal interludes and mild magical realism, Viktoria conveys a vivid you-are-there sense of life under
Communism. There is a ring of truth to it, precisely because of the absurdity. Young
Viktoria’s special midriff make-up also looks quite realistic. However, the
post-1989 narrative largely loses both its bite and its focus. It seems like it
takes Vitkova forty minutes to never really figure out how to end it all. Still, considering the running time is over
two and a half hours, there is a good feature’s length of material that works.
While
the third act might have problems, it is hardly the fault of Kalina Vitkova,
who is hauntingly expressive as the twentysomething Viktoria. Likewise, her younger sister Daria is a
remarkable force as the imperious and then chastened grade school Viktoria.
Yet, it is Irmena Chichikova’s Borynana who will really get under viewers’
skin, depicting a persona forced into itself by circumstances and a
totalitarian state.