Review: Raising Victor Vargas

The film is a tenderhearted evocation of a young Latino boy’s conflicts with girls and his own stubborn family.

Raising Victor Vargas
Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas is a tenderhearted evocation of a young Latino boy’s conflicts with girls and his stubborn family. The titular lothario (Victor Rasuk) lives with his sister, brother, and grandmother in a Lower East Side apartment and spends his summer hanging out on the streets and looking for girls at the city pool. If the look of the film recalls David Gordon Green’s George Washington, it’s no coincidence, as Sollett enlisted cinematographer Tim Orr to create for him the same glorious Cinemascope palette that distinguished Green’s first feature. Raising Victor Vargas has the sun-drenched look of a ’70s relic, with only the occasional pop-cultural reference (from concert posters to a photo of Aaliyah to a Mini Me mention) rooting the film in the present day.

The timelessness of the film’s curiously non-gentrified Lower East Side milieu suggests that Victor’s struggle with the world is itself a timeless one. Victor fights with his sister (a remarkably bratty Krystal Rodriquez) and helps ease his brother, Nino (Silvestre Rasuk), into adolescence, in the process incurring his grandmother’s (Altagracia Guzman) wrath. The film unravels like a blazing collection of snapshots chronicling the many fears and joys of growing up for a group of teenagers: the distrust that “Juicy Judy” (Judy Marte) and her best friend have for boys; Nino’s masturbation troubles; and the tenderness of a first kiss.

Some critics will no doubt call Raising Victor Vargas a minor work when, in reality, this deceptively simple film’s scope is so uniquely and blazingly authentic. Anyone who fails to recognize Sollet’s remarkable ability to observe and chronicle otherwise insignificant events that, when strung together, threaten to explode is to do the film a major disservice. Despite a clunky series of scenes that trace the grandmother’s stubbornness and the family’s trip to family court, Raising Victor Vargas is a coming-of-age tale of universal appeal.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Cast: Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, Melonie Diaz, Altagracia Guzman, Silvestre Rasuk, Krystal Rodriguez, Kevin Rivera, Wilfree Vasquez, Donna Maldonado  Director: Peter Sollett  Screenwriter: Peter Sollett, Eva Vives  Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films  Running Time: 88 min  Rating: R  Year: 2002  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.