Raising Victor Vargas

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Tender and vulnerable, with the natural rhythm of the city streets, Raising Victor Vargas gives us a glimpse of growing up from the inside out, in a warm, sweet twist on traditional teen fare.

Written and directed by Peter Sollett as a coming-of-age narrative captured in progress, Raising Victor Vargas eschews the genre's awkward beginnings and pat endings -- and does without the forced conflicts and contrived climax. It offers instead a very real-feeling slice of life, lovingly cut to fit the patterns of New York's Lower East Side with all its ethnic and social particularities, and to hug its characters with an emotional honesty universal in its touch points, profound yet never extreme.

We're not in Kansas, Toto, and we're not in Hollywood. But we're also not in the tired faux-true grit of urban revelation and revisionism. The focus here is not the city hard-shell shock of such as of Larry Clark's Kids, who inhabit the same realm.

Victor Vargas (Victor Rasuk) lives in a small apartment with his younger brother Nino (Silvestre Rasuk, his real-life brother) who looks up to him, Vicky (Krystal Rodriguez), his younger sister who does not, and the aged old-world grandmother that is their only parent (Altagracia Guzman).

Victor is a 16-year-old boy like any 16-year-old boy, bungling determinedly over the threshold to manhood and machismo and stumbling maladroitly around the distaff details. We meet him mid-bungle, murmuring bad boy lines to convince the apparently infamously willing, but famously unwanted Fat Donna (Donna
Maldonado) who lives upstairs, that their anticipated love-making should be their secret. His friend Harold (Kevin Rivera), calling from the street, interrupts his in flagrante pre delicto, but his street cred is put nonetheless in jeopardy by the gleefully nemetic Vicky, who also caught him there at that wrong window.

In part to salvage his reputation, in part to set it up, Victor paces the city's summer sidewalks with a shirtless swagger that reveals him more as child than player -- until he spots his solution at the neighborhood pool. Across the water, "Juicy Judy" Ramirez (Judy Marte), the unattainable opposite of his hoping-to-be-forgotten last conquest, sits lithe and alluring, the stuff of which teenage myths are made. Grabbing Harold for support, he approaches her where she sits distant and distrustful with her friend Melonie (Melonie Diaz). But while Harold and Melonie seem to connect, Judy swats Victor away, haughtily. Undeterred -- or desperate -- he works out a deal with Judy's younger brother Carlos (Wilfree Vasquez): a sister for a sister, a hook-up for a hook-up.

Delicately, three youthful, innocent, compelling romances unfold. Melonie, bespectacled and mousey, becomes Pretty Woman to Harold's hilariously sweet begging ("pleeeeeease, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please . . ." he gurgles as she takes off her glasses and undoes her hair), and Carlos and Vicky do the child's dance of repel and attract - push and pull - stalk and stay, until we, too, jump at the ringing phone. But Victor and Judy move the most slowly, and seem to have the hardest climb. This is their story, and the world moves in most heavily upon them for the very things they see in each other.

While Judy is troubled by the harassing attentions of the boys on the block, Victor's attempts at manhood, weak though they be, have his grandmother up in arms. She holds him to blame for his sister's exposure and his brother's masturbation, and she wants him out. There are few scenes in film more touching and more humorous at the same time than her forced family outing to the family services clinic, and the follow up family visit to the local church. Heartbreaking and heartwarming all at once, like grandma's own story of growing up, we get an image of family, frustration, fear and hope.

Finally, it seems, with a glass of water, a lipstick mark, and an invitation . . . grandma and Judy each comes to realize, despite misgivings about letting go or giving in, that Victor is a good boy after all, on his way to becoming a good man. It is a simple tale, a passing moment in time, with not so much a resolution as a step in the right direction.

Developed from Sollett’s student film at NYU (Five Feet High and Rising, which also starred Victor Rasuk and Judy Marte), this first feature film by the director is admirably spare - tightly focused, precisely photographed, and cleanly edited. Peopled by unprofessional - but certainly not unskilled - actors who embody their characters without pretense or cliché, improvised from a script written for the guidance of the producer and the crew, and rehearsed for a month, it pulsates with the passing pains and indomitable truths of the real world.

"You're so easy to see through," Judy flashes at Victor early on, "it's embarrassing," -- but that's exactly the point, it turns out. Raising Victor Vargas lets us spy ever so gently the world underneath, behind or absent the protective, exploited veneer of the badasses, brats, vixens and vamps that make up the adolescent set and makes us see not only that we once were they, but that inside of us, if not right on the surface, we still are.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene