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alibi_shop(Disclaimer: I'm two degrees of separation from Tanya Saracho, whose show this is.)
I'm a little nervous about comparing Vida to Jaime Hernandez's rightfully famous Locas comics in Love and Rockets, because that could just be a pointless way of saying that I'm unfamiliar with other serialized fiction about Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles (also, a comic is not a TV storyboard, duh). But what I mean, besides that Vida is really really good, is that the writing and directing(*) in both of them share some distinctive qualities that work especially well for the stories they're telling. I'll get to that in a minute, I just wanted to put it up front because as soon as I realized what this was slightly reminding me of, I was pretty much guaranteed to like it.
(* When I say directing in comics, I mean every artistic choice that isn't the text, isn't the basic description of what happens, and isn't the drawing style.)
The basic story is that two sisters from LA, Emma and Lyn, return there because their mother Vidalia has died, and they've inherited the family business—a popular neighborhood bar, plus the apartment building it's in—but only in part: it also belongs to their mother's wife, Eddy, whom they never heard of until now. Eddy is well liked in the neighborhood and wants to keep the bar going; Emma, who has a white-collar job in Chicago, is desperate to sell everything and leave (there's a ticking clock because Vida was in a financial hole); Lyn, a somewhat spacey New Age libertine, is more on Eddy's side but very distracted by the presence of her ex, Johnny. Johnny's sister Marisol is heavy into anti-gentrification activism and sees Emma, somewhat understandably, as the devil.
All of those ingredients could easily be made into a pretty conventional family drama with a sprinkling of ethnic flavor, with the only new angle being that same-sex marriage is now legal. Vida isn't that. It's deeply interested in class, the idea of authenticity, how money affects relationships, closeted vs. quasi-closeted vs. totally unapologetic sexuality, politics on an informal level, chosen family, code-switching, and how communities die. It manages to address those things while keeping up a suspenseful and often very funny multi-threaded story in half-hour episodes, without really having a main protagonist. I have no idea how much of this is in the short story it's based on, but getting all of that into three hours of TV is an achievement that Saracho's earlier work on Looking (as story editor and co-producer), much as I liked that show, didn't prepare me for.
While this isn't nearly as gigantic and meandering a story as Locas, it faces a similar challenge of quickly setting up a densely populated and interconnected little world where people often have their feet in several subcultures, and where a lot of the cultural context is barely represented in mass media so some viewers will be much more confused than others, and it has a similar goal of recognizing great diversity within groups that outsiders might see as uniform. So it's not surprising that Saracho and Hernandez have some similar strategies. One is a strong attention to visual detail: people's clothes and hair and makeup are extremely specific, the cast has very diverse and distinctive facial features and body types, the production design is meticulous (if someone's lived in an apartment for 50 years, that's how it looks), transitions between neighborhoods and environments are carefully set up so you always know where you are. The short episode format requires a good sense of how long to linger on a scene to move along a subplot or deepen a character; it rarely wastes a second but it doesn't feel like we're just arbitrarily flitting around. The dialogue is never just about plot and emotion, it's always efficiently filling out the characters via their choices of words and modes of speaking (there's a fair amount of untranslated Spanish; if you don't speak it, you can get some of it from context, but yes you will be missing some things and that's deliberate).
And—again a thing that Hernandez does well and many others do badly—there's a whole lot of sex of many kinds, directed and acted with an eye toward humor and realism. It's a very queer show where straight relationships also exist, and nothing is framed as more or less transgressive than anything else except in terms of the emotional context for the characters. Emma has a variety of partners but the story isn't about her trying to define her sexual identity; what matters is that she resents her mother for being homophobic toward her but then finding happiness with a woman late in life (this isn't conveyed in a speech; there's a single two-word line, and we get it), and that she has trouble feeling solidarity with other people on any basis. There's so much warmth in this aspect of the show that when hatred and violence do eventually show up, it doesn't feel like a dramatic moment with a social message: it feels like a sickening violation of everything good in the world (consider this a trigger warning for episode 6, seriously).
I like the whole cast but the show couldn't possibly be what it is without Ser Anzoategui as Eddy. Eddy isn't just a character we haven't seen before in terms of her plot role, she's a vividly specific personality who is immediately adorable and benevolent without being a saint; Anzoategui keeps Eddy's grief and her basic practicality always present, and in her scenes with the sisters you can see her constantly figuring out how to be diplomatic but make it seem casual—I can't say enough good things about this performance. Chelsea Rendon as Marisol also has a tough and important job, being the youngest and in some ways most naïve of the main characters but also the one who identifies most aggressively as Chicana and carries the political subplot(*), and she's really solid; the show is slow in building up her role but I like where she's going.
(* Something that may not be immediately apparent to non-Californians is that the idea of a neighborhood-specific anti-gentrification movement that screams in people's faces and trashes property on a regular basis, with the express goal of scaring away not only Anglo business owners but wealthier people of any kind, isn't speculative and isn't a stand-in for radical groups in general. That's just Boyle Heights. The show's position on this is complicated, and I'm not surprised that the real Defend Boyle Heights group attacked the project as just another bunch of outsiders, but I think it's fair to say that even though Marisol isn't always right and the guy who runs their group is a sleaze, they're shown to be totally correct in their overall perception of what's happening and their anger is justified. Vida doesn't really bother with exposition about this, or having anyone stop to explain what "chipster" and "gentefier" mean, but it's all pretty clear.)
I'm in no way qualified to comment on how accurately the show portrays any aspect of Chicanx life and I've barely even been to LA. I just think this is a good story very well made, with things to say that are worth saying, and (since I didn't swear at all yet and that's not representative of the show) it's entertaining as fuck.
I'm a little nervous about comparing Vida to Jaime Hernandez's rightfully famous Locas comics in Love and Rockets, because that could just be a pointless way of saying that I'm unfamiliar with other serialized fiction about Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles (also, a comic is not a TV storyboard, duh). But what I mean, besides that Vida is really really good, is that the writing and directing(*) in both of them share some distinctive qualities that work especially well for the stories they're telling. I'll get to that in a minute, I just wanted to put it up front because as soon as I realized what this was slightly reminding me of, I was pretty much guaranteed to like it.
(* When I say directing in comics, I mean every artistic choice that isn't the text, isn't the basic description of what happens, and isn't the drawing style.)
The basic story is that two sisters from LA, Emma and Lyn, return there because their mother Vidalia has died, and they've inherited the family business—a popular neighborhood bar, plus the apartment building it's in—but only in part: it also belongs to their mother's wife, Eddy, whom they never heard of until now. Eddy is well liked in the neighborhood and wants to keep the bar going; Emma, who has a white-collar job in Chicago, is desperate to sell everything and leave (there's a ticking clock because Vida was in a financial hole); Lyn, a somewhat spacey New Age libertine, is more on Eddy's side but very distracted by the presence of her ex, Johnny. Johnny's sister Marisol is heavy into anti-gentrification activism and sees Emma, somewhat understandably, as the devil.
All of those ingredients could easily be made into a pretty conventional family drama with a sprinkling of ethnic flavor, with the only new angle being that same-sex marriage is now legal. Vida isn't that. It's deeply interested in class, the idea of authenticity, how money affects relationships, closeted vs. quasi-closeted vs. totally unapologetic sexuality, politics on an informal level, chosen family, code-switching, and how communities die. It manages to address those things while keeping up a suspenseful and often very funny multi-threaded story in half-hour episodes, without really having a main protagonist. I have no idea how much of this is in the short story it's based on, but getting all of that into three hours of TV is an achievement that Saracho's earlier work on Looking (as story editor and co-producer), much as I liked that show, didn't prepare me for.
While this isn't nearly as gigantic and meandering a story as Locas, it faces a similar challenge of quickly setting up a densely populated and interconnected little world where people often have their feet in several subcultures, and where a lot of the cultural context is barely represented in mass media so some viewers will be much more confused than others, and it has a similar goal of recognizing great diversity within groups that outsiders might see as uniform. So it's not surprising that Saracho and Hernandez have some similar strategies. One is a strong attention to visual detail: people's clothes and hair and makeup are extremely specific, the cast has very diverse and distinctive facial features and body types, the production design is meticulous (if someone's lived in an apartment for 50 years, that's how it looks), transitions between neighborhoods and environments are carefully set up so you always know where you are. The short episode format requires a good sense of how long to linger on a scene to move along a subplot or deepen a character; it rarely wastes a second but it doesn't feel like we're just arbitrarily flitting around. The dialogue is never just about plot and emotion, it's always efficiently filling out the characters via their choices of words and modes of speaking (there's a fair amount of untranslated Spanish; if you don't speak it, you can get some of it from context, but yes you will be missing some things and that's deliberate).
And—again a thing that Hernandez does well and many others do badly—there's a whole lot of sex of many kinds, directed and acted with an eye toward humor and realism. It's a very queer show where straight relationships also exist, and nothing is framed as more or less transgressive than anything else except in terms of the emotional context for the characters. Emma has a variety of partners but the story isn't about her trying to define her sexual identity; what matters is that she resents her mother for being homophobic toward her but then finding happiness with a woman late in life (this isn't conveyed in a speech; there's a single two-word line, and we get it), and that she has trouble feeling solidarity with other people on any basis. There's so much warmth in this aspect of the show that when hatred and violence do eventually show up, it doesn't feel like a dramatic moment with a social message: it feels like a sickening violation of everything good in the world (consider this a trigger warning for episode 6, seriously).
I like the whole cast but the show couldn't possibly be what it is without Ser Anzoategui as Eddy. Eddy isn't just a character we haven't seen before in terms of her plot role, she's a vividly specific personality who is immediately adorable and benevolent without being a saint; Anzoategui keeps Eddy's grief and her basic practicality always present, and in her scenes with the sisters you can see her constantly figuring out how to be diplomatic but make it seem casual—I can't say enough good things about this performance. Chelsea Rendon as Marisol also has a tough and important job, being the youngest and in some ways most naïve of the main characters but also the one who identifies most aggressively as Chicana and carries the political subplot(*), and she's really solid; the show is slow in building up her role but I like where she's going.
(* Something that may not be immediately apparent to non-Californians is that the idea of a neighborhood-specific anti-gentrification movement that screams in people's faces and trashes property on a regular basis, with the express goal of scaring away not only Anglo business owners but wealthier people of any kind, isn't speculative and isn't a stand-in for radical groups in general. That's just Boyle Heights. The show's position on this is complicated, and I'm not surprised that the real Defend Boyle Heights group attacked the project as just another bunch of outsiders, but I think it's fair to say that even though Marisol isn't always right and the guy who runs their group is a sleaze, they're shown to be totally correct in their overall perception of what's happening and their anger is justified. Vida doesn't really bother with exposition about this, or having anyone stop to explain what "chipster" and "gentefier" mean, but it's all pretty clear.)
I'm in no way qualified to comment on how accurately the show portrays any aspect of Chicanx life and I've barely even been to LA. I just think this is a good story very well made, with things to say that are worth saying, and (since I didn't swear at all yet and that's not representative of the show) it's entertaining as fuck.
no subject
2019-06-20 04:11 (UTC)M: (just curious) Why are you fuckin' with your sign?
E: Uh, apparently it's racist?
M: (figured everyone knew that) Well yeah, it's racist as fuck, but why are you taking it down now?