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May 1- 7, 2003

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The Rules of the Game

Making a move: Victor (Victor Rasuk) and Judy (Judy Marte) get it together.

A would-be player rethinks his ways in Raising Victor Vargas.

by Cindy Fuchs

Raising Victor Vargas opens on Victor (Victor Rasuk) posing. Cocking his hip and caressing his chest, he gazes steadfastly at the camera, seductive. Cut to the object of his look, his downstairs neighbor, "Fat Donna" (Donna Maldonado). When she shows him a Polaroid she’s taken, the two of them together, Victor takes a stand. "I’m a private person," he says, "I like to keep shit on the low."

And with that, Victor's cover is blown. His buddy, Harold (Kevin Rivera), yells up from the street, Victor pokes his head out the window, revealing to his sister, Vicky (Krystal Rodriguez), that he is, as she puts it, "Fat Donna's man." This sends 16-year-old Victor into something of a panic, as he's working a player's rep. In an effort to salvage his good name, Victor's prowling the public pool the next morning in his Lower East Side neighborhood, where he spots and directly approaches "Juicy Judy" (Judy Marte) and her friend, Melonie (Melonie Diaz). Judy, however, resists, and so begins Victor's "raising," as he comes to understand that his relationships are more complicated than projections of his own immediate desires. This means he has to negotiate, not only with Vicky and Judy, but also with his younger brother, Nino (Silvestre Rasuk), and their Dominican-born grandma (Altagracia Guzman), an old-school sort who tries her best to maintain order in their tiny apartment.

Victor's story is at once mundane and delicate, familiar and fresh. This compelling combination emerges as much in Tim Orr's nuanced camerawork (he's previously worked with David Gordon Green, on George Washington and All the Real Girls) as in director Peter Sollett's impressionistic structure and obviously painstaking work with his actors. Based on his award-winning short film, Five Feet High and Rising (made when he was an NYU student), Victor uses many of the same performers, which means they've worked together, on this material, for years.

In the film's press kit, Sollett describes the process this way: "I started by deciding not to give them a script." Though he and the crew did have one (developed at Sundance, no less), he had the cast rehearse for a month before shooting, in order to hone their "imaginative capability to detach from reality and resign themselves to the situation before them in a scene." While this may sound more like therapy than filmmaking, the result is a subtle, unfussy first feature. In one memorably simple sequence, Victor, eager to impress, buys Judy a "Homies" action figure (the one that pops out of the machine happens to be in a wheelchair); leaving him in the street outside the convenience store ("You call me, right?" he asks repeatedly), Judy takes the toy home and places it thoughtfully on her dresser. This brief moment says as much about her self-understanding as any standard teen-flick chat.