Raising Victor Vargas | Review

Slice-of-life portrait has got plenty of heart.

Pimple-faced young teens with feelings? Grand-mothers who actually sound like grandmothers? New York City apartments without the luxury of air-conditioning? Sexual awakenings, summer love and sibling rivalry are at the surface of this charmingly simple, unpretentious film debut from director Peter Sollett’s who gives us a magnified portrait of a family unit in the lower east side.

Inspired from a previous short film project, Raising Victor Vargas is a fit title for what a smallish Latino grandmother must suffer through the hardship of doing the heroic job of trying to teach her three grandchildren the rights from wrongs, but in the times of J-Lo and the rest of the MTV characterizations the kids seem to be on the path of growing up faster than they can think. The pleasant tunes from the family piano get trampled over by excessive telephone rings, siblings fighting with words and weird sounds coming from the bathroom. Think of this film as a PG-rated version as Larry Clark’s Kids, which captures, in a first person’s account how it feels like to be a teen in the workings of the inner city New York borough culture. This is not a piece that exploits its subjects, but rather lets them be as real as the language they use, the clothing they where and they come across as authentically detailed as the paint-chipped walled apartments and telephones with pad-locks. The protagonist comes in the form of Victor (Victor Rasuk) whose hormones seem as out of control as the rest of the neighborhood youths and his young gigolo ways of trying to talk sweet to the ladies at the local pool doesn’t seem to work on this one girl (Judy Marte) who refers to him as bug spray, but a hamburger dinner and the boy’s good intentions show us that not all men grow up to be total pigs.

With the theme of ‘trust’ as a guide, we watch how girls come to trust boys who have only one thing in mind and witness how grandmothers from generations back come to trust the words of a child. Embedded in this screenplay are characters that we get easily drawn to, especially the grandmother (Altagracia Guzman), who is probably the best golden-age generation mother since Scorsese’s mother in Goodfellas. I particularly liked the character of Victor and his hormonal ambitions, and his look and natural acting ability in front of the camera. What Sollett creates here is a refreshing portrait of youth; forget about the L’Oreal Hollywood supermodel treatment, this is about getting to the soul of these people with young minds. With the tools of the hand held camera and the use of the close-up shot to get us in the thick of it all. We get the crowded apartment point of views and first kisses with a surprisingly natural poetic aura about it, but the film really solidifies itself as a great piece of work by capturing subtle moments in their lives that we rarely see in films, such as when the grandmother and the eldest of the children come to an a compromise with one another.

With a genuineness which is as factual as a young Latina’s moustache, this film is funny and is a better film recipe than a film like My Big Fat Greek Wedding giving us an anecdote for the low-class family portrait about the inner workings of how a real family works. Raising Victor Vargas is a reason to celebrate the independent scene and is a great example of why it doesn’t take the support of a mega studio to make a poignant film about real people in real situations.

Rating 3.5 stars