You Can Dance If You Wanna: Akin Returns with Experimental Dance Romance

Perhaps the most interesting elements of Aviva rest in its origins and its attempts to reconcile the innate difference between love and lust in the digital era. It is the latest offering from director Boaz Yakin, a director whose 1994 debut Fresh, starring Samuel L. Jackson, arrived in an era where complex Black characterizations proliferated American indie cinema—though Yakin is Israeli-American, he arrived in the wake of seminal titles delivered by the likes of Spike Lee, Ernest Dickerson, John Singleton and Charles Burnett, to name but a few.

He’s best remembered for his studio offerings, like the Denzel Washington sports melodrama Remember the Titans (2000) and the Brittany Murphy rom-com Uptown Girls (2003). Always defying categorization, his latest is perhaps the most unexpected turn to date from Yakin, a sexually charged romantic dance drama utilizing dancers as a revolving coterie of lead characters. While not as compelling as it promises, it’s an interesting experiment of personality shifts and psychological intersections.

On a superficial level, Aviva plays like the hydra-headed love child of Pina Bausch and Gaspar Noe, a tastefully smutty glance at men and women more in love with the idea of love than anything else. Yakin’s choice to deliver two characterizations of both Aviva and Eden from separate actors recalls the spirit of Bunuel’s classic That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), where Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina both played the chambermaid Conchita (a role originated by Dietrich in Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman, 1935).

In Yakin’s world, both men and women, straight and gay, are bedeviled, as the projections both characters convey prior to meeting the other inevitably provides the first crack in their romantic fantasies. But Yakin’s complex passages of dialogue prove to be ultimately too much for some of the performers to wade through, and whole chunks of stilted exchanges tend to sully the film’s buoyancy. If Zina Zinchenko and Or Schraiber are more easily able to channel their anguish, the Tyler Phillips version of Eden, who engages with both, tends to drain their exchanges.

At nearly two hours, Yakin’s running time is also a hindrance, with some other asides, like a group of schoolchildren rapping, serving as labored distractions meant to enhance the flavor of New York, seeming unnecessary. While one wonders what might have been if the film had collapsed some of its repetitive exchanges in favor of its more contemplative moments, wherein dance is utilized as fluid progression (or an inspired display of an imaginative depiction of Los Angeles), some of the truncated exposition, wherein morose ponderings filter over montages, sometimes makes Aviva play like a sad commercial. Still, the duality remains interesting, and if the cast isn’t always up to task, the performers deserve acknowledgment for the commitment, while Yakin’s inclusion of sex and sexuality adds another necessary breath of fresh air to aid in snippets of authenticity.

★★½/☆☆☆☆☆