So here's another quiet innovation in Raising Victor Vargas Even the poster images are identical: various permutations of evening-dressed Grants, McConaugheys and Bullocks placed back-to-back against the New York skyline, the boy looking helpless, the girl poised to issue some wiseass remark. Glance at the poster, and you'll see a pair of lovers backed by the shapes of some familiar Big Apple landmarks. Take a second look, though, and you'll notice that the pictured couple have been snapped in a less rhetorical pose, that they're wearing chainstore clothes, and that the Empire State Building is sharing the space behind their shoulders with a crowd of rather less iconic structures: crumbling apartment blocks, shabby tenements, grubby water tanks.The hero of Peter Sollett's film is Victor (played by Victor Rasuk), the unruly teenage son of an average American family (urban, Hispanic, cash-strapped), who falls for Judy (Judy Martel), a girl he meets at the local lido. In the middle of this summer romance, Victor's domestic life is buckling under the pressure of adolescence. His grandmother (Altagracia Guzman), the family's breadwinner, believes that he is getting his younger brother (Silvestre Razuk) into bad habits, some of which involve a locked bathroom door. Her solution is to attempt to sign over responsibility for him to the social services. The movie is a blast of clean, cool air through one of Anglophone cinema's most foetidly formulaic genres. There's no hint in the finished picture of the problems that beset the shoot. But Sollett and his cast were very nearly forced to abandon the picture three-quarters through filming. The fifth-to-last day of their schedule fell on 11 September, 2001.First things first. Raising Victor Vargas began life as an autobiographical piece set in the Jewish and Italian Brooklyn of Sollett's own teenage years. "But the kids sent to us by the talent agencies were really boring," he confesses.
"They were just mimicking the kind of acting that they'd seen on television." To illustrate his point, he launches into an impression of Macaulay Culkin, clapping his face in his hands and pursing his mouth into the shape of a cat's bumhole. "Ooooh! Aaah! All that ridiculous stuff." In an attempt to bypass all the Mrs Worthingtons and Doris Schwartzes, Sollett changed his tack, and, in the process, transformed the nature of the film. He leafleted in the streets around his apartment on the Lower East Side. "Everyone who came in, by virtue of where we were located in the city, was Latino."So here's another quiet innovation in Raising Victor Vargas. Hispanic families in American films tend to fall into two categories: gun-toting small-time crims, or back-slapping, salt-of-the-earth, beans-and-fajitas types who show the stiff-backed white-bread characters how to samba. The hero of the piece, 19-year-old Victor Rasuk, is confident about the authenticity of the scenes that Sollett and his cast have transferred to the screen. "Everyone in the cast lives that sort of life in the barrio," he explains "We incorporated a lot of our experiences in the film. |
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