THE STORY – Nora is a forty-year-old cancer survivor who decides to live her life to the full with consequences.
THE CAST – Aina Clotet, Marc Soler, Naby Dakhli, Lloll Bertran, Zaida Pérez, Guillermo Toledo & Josh Zuckerman
THE TEAM – Aina Clotet (Director/Writer) & Valentina Viso (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 113 Minutes
There are some shots where audiences may feel as though they’ve never seen anything like them on film before. “Viva (Alive)” begins with one such image, and it is likely one many men have never encountered in real life either. It opens with a woman undergoing a mammogram, the breast compressed in a vice-like machine in a way that will likely have many women wincing from memory and others simply wincing from discomfort. It is an image that feels painful, absurd, and obscenely intimate all at once.
The woman undergoing the procedure is Nora, played by veteran actor and first-time director Aiana Clotet. Nora is a doctor herself and has already undergone a partial mastectomy, believing she has emerged on the other side of cancer. But when her physician suggests a quick biopsy, “probably nothing,” Nora delays it. It is the first in a chain of decisions that sends her life spiraling into tragicomic territory.
At forty, Nora has felt death brush against her, and now she wants to live with urgency. She becomes a disruptor in her own life, moving fast and breaking things. She begins cheating on her strikingly handsome partner Tom (Naby Dakhli) with Max (Marc Soler), a goofy and significantly younger man who had previously been sexting her after meeting only once. Tom is grounded and nurturing, preparing lunches designed to strengthen her immune system and building a countryside retreat where they can live sustainably. Max, meanwhile, is a restless deejay and dancer, all movement and chaos, with little indication of any long-term direction. He recalls the rich, impulsive young husband from “Anora.” Nora’s choices and reckless behavior mirror the broader world around her, where climate change has worsened, water shortages and blackouts are becoming routine, and instead of confronting looming existential crises, people distract themselves with pleasure and avoidance.
Nora’s scattered emotional state means that despite being a respected healthcare professional, lecturer, and researcher presenting at international conferences, she is also something of a disaster in motion. Mishaps occur repeatedly, and at one point she abruptly pauses her own lecture to sneak off for a moment of private relief in a bathroom cubicle. Were the character male, audiences might dismiss it as sleazy but unsurprising. The strength of Clotet and Valentina Viso’s screenplay, alongside Clotet’s performance, is that Nora remains relatable and funny throughout. She behaves selfishly and hurts people around her, occasionally testing the audience’s patience and sympathy, but she remains recognizably human: someone struggling to process an impossible hand she has been dealt.
Nilo Zimmerman’s camera observes the world with attentiveness, capturing the details of this slightly altered near-future reality: parched ochre landscapes, swarms of flies, and the interiors of San Francisco hotels or Spanish fairgrounds glowing at night. Insects and flies become recurring visual motifs, reminders of the fleetingness of life itself. Why should human existence be any more permanent? The cinematography reflects Nora’s own heightened awareness after nearly losing everything, rendering colors brighter and sound more vivid, while imbuing the world with the sensation of someone experiencing it all as if for the first time.
Ultimately, “Alive” is a sharp and clever film layered with subtleties that may not immediately reveal themselves beneath its occasional laugh-out-loud comedy. Some of that humor becomes impressively dark, including one especially effective sequence targeting male insecurity with painful precision. Nora proves an endlessly compelling character study. With her cropped hair, there is something faintly reminiscent of Jean Seberg about her appearance, though it also carries visible reminders of the experiences she has endured. Surrounding her are well-meaning friends and brilliant but emotionally detached divorced parents, all orbiting a woman desperately trying to reclaim control of a life she suddenly realizes may be far more fragile than she ever imagined.
