Film Reviews

Viva Riva!

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• Director:
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• Details: Democratic Republic of Congo / 98mins (18).

A journey into the dark heart of a city where corruption, violence and sex are everyday facets of life, Viva Riva! is written and directed with enthusiasm butthere's no escaping thatis amateur hour.
Set in Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of Congo, the Riva (Bay) of the title is a smuggler, driving stolen barrels of petrol across the border from Angola to provide the city with much-needed fuel. This time, however, he's stolen from the wrong people: Cesar (Fortuna) is a vicious gangster and, after blackmailing a commander of the Congolese army, worms his way into the city's criminal underworld in search of the flashy thief. Oblivious to this, Riva has his eyes set on the beautiful Nora (Malone), squeeze of local gangster and headcase Azor (Amekindra).
First the good. Munga sets things up nicely in the first twenty minutes: a charismatic, handsome good guy in Riva, his enemy in the brutal Angolan crime boss Cesar and his goal – the sexy mistress to one of the city's most notorious criminals in Azor. In Malone, who oozes sex appeal, and Fortuna, who slips about the seedy backstreets with a quiet but creepy grace, Munga has unearthed two raw talents that we'll be seeing again soon. The writer-director has a real feel for the Kinshasan people, and the dangerous slums and backstreets they inhabit.
Now the bad. The earliest warning sign is the subtitles. At first, the benefit of the doubt is given as some of the dialogue might have been lost in translation but as Viva Riva! continues its obvious that the sloppy dialogue is typical of the rest of the film. It's unclear whether the Blaxploitation genre – and everything that was sent up about it in the recent Black Dynamite – was an indirect influence or that Munga reckons those movies are the peak of the cinematic experience, but Viva Riva! encompasses all of what made that 70s genre laughable. Bar Malone and Fortuna, the rest of the cast aren't up to it, and Bay, although looking the part, is far too concerned with looking cool for the camera than concentrating on his craft. Munga thinks in scenes rather than sequences and each one stands alone with little thought of what went before or what's to come.
Poor.

Review by Gavin Burke