“Viktoria”: A Great Film About Women, by a Woman

The woman card, as everyone but an iron-coiffed Presidential candidate knows, subjects its bearer's body to the will and dogma of predominantly male politicians—and it's valid the world over. But the terms and conditions vary, country by country, just as the user experience varies person by person. The Bulgarian film “Viktoria,” directed by Maya Vitkova, is a wildly imaginative yet fiercely precise, grandly political yet bracingly intimate report on being a woman in Bulgaria at a time when politics and private life were conspicuously intertwined. The film covers the time of the Communist dictatorship, when the country was under Soviet dominion—and then follows to when that rigid order was swept away, leaving both a sense of boundless hope and a boundless void, creating a moment of seemingly limitless possibilities built on an impossible mourning for the entire vanished structure of the imagination.

Irmena Chichikova and Daria Vitkova in “Viktoria.”Photograph Courtesy Big World Pictures

“Viktoria” is a very rare kind of film, one that is centered on the feelings of bearing a woman's body—of the physical as well as emotional inwardness of women's lives—and that also depicts the vast national and even world-historical stage that renders it at once real and mythic, far beyond reach and all-too-present. It’s a long film—two and a half hours; it has an elaborate and intricate plot that’s full of twists and details so sharply observed and cleverly realized that all of them seem like spoilers, looking back from the ultimate dramatic resolution to the premise with which the action starts, in the first dramatic scene.

The very description of the plot shines with the film’s ingenuity and emotional intensity. It’s a passionately realistic story that details the daily lives of its characters but is based on wondrous flights of fantasy that Vitkova realizes by means of simple yet gleefully audacious special effects. For all its basis in political and historical frustrations and affirmations, “Viktoria” is an exquisitely stylized film, with precisely composed and timed images of a delicate and involute whimsy that stifles howls of rage and derision, quiet and terse dialogue that distills lifelong passions and longings in the lacerating undertones of simple phrases that glint like blades catching sunlight.

The title character doesn’t turn up for a while, and she isn’t even really the protagonist. That would be Boryana (Irmena Chichikova), a thirtyish woman when she’s first seen, in 1979, possessed by strong love, strong hate, and one precise longing: she wants to get the hell out of Communist Bulgaria and go to the United States. She’s a librarian; her husband, Ivan (Dimo Dimov), is a doctor. They share an apartment—and a bedroom—with her widowed mother (Mariana Krumova), a Party member, whom Boryana hates both for that affiliation and for being a neglectful mother. Ivan wants a child; Boryana refuses to get pregnant until they go to America. One of Boryana’s prized possessions is a cigarette lighter in the shape of the Statue of Liberty. Another of her prized possessions, one concealed in the toilet tank (along with bottles of Coke chilling in the cold water), suspended high above the bowl, close to the ceiling, is the bulb and probe with which she administers violent douches, virtual self-administered abortions, the morning after sex with Ivan. But Boryana gets pregnant anyway—and the baby, a girl, whom they name Viktoria, bears an odd mark from the attempted abortion: she’s born without a belly button.

Word of this medical wonder—the word “miracle” would be banned in a Socialist country, where it would evoke the opium of the masses—quickly whispers its way up from the local hospital to the highest reaches of power. Soon thereafter, mother and newborn daughter, parked in a vast and pristinely whitewashed hall, receive a visit from the country’s dictator, Todor Zhivkov (played in the film by Georgi Spasov), and his entourage of applauding yes-people. To him, the belly-buttonless Viktoria is an avatar of a new Communist order—one in which babies can be born outside the womb, leaving women free (or “free”) to keep working without interruption for the “bright Socialist future.”

Named the country’s Baby of the Decade, Viktoria comes with perks: her parents get a new apartment in a soulless modern compound perched high above Sofia; they get a new car; they get a place of prominence at official functions that they’re obligated to attend. As for Viktoria, she gets a telephone in her bedroom—a blinking red hotline to Zhivkov—and a chauffeured vehicle. She’s an instant young star of the official Communist youth organization, the Pioneers (a real thing), and she becomes a total Communist spoiled brat, with her red scarf and red book bag, lording her position over her classmates like a capriciously sadistic martinet. Meanwhile, Boryana clings to her dreams of emigration (I won’t spoil the twist, but Vitkova handles it with a breathtaking blend of comedy and suspense).

Viktoria turns ten (a landmark that itself becomes an object of deft political satire), and then the Wall falls, followed by Zhivkov’s regime. Both Viktoria and her grandmother suddenly become irrelevant, but, in the process, they fulfill the quip about the closeness of grandparents and grandchildren—because they share a common enemy. Vitkova depicts this relationship, too, as an intimate one, rooted in the continuities of women’s bodies, and she pursues the subject through to grandly melodramatic yet deeply affecting conclusions, touching on the core of existence, on matters of life, infirmity, and death.

Vitkova renders the viscosities of bodily fluids—blood, milk, amniotic fluid—as powerful natural symbols, using meticulous observation of extreme daily intimacies as well as bold special effects. Another daring effect is the weaving of archival footage into the drama, as of Bulgaria’s 1980 May Day parade, into which live action featuring Boryana has been deftly integrated—along with parts of Boryana’s inner life, which can’t be seen but which the director nonetheless audaciously and wryly realizes with a visual and sonic imagination of a rare power and flair.

“Viktoria” runs on the power of political pageantry and propaganda, mass political events, ambient jargon. Vitkova’s depiction of historical personae and events suggests the tuning and conditioning of imagination, and of personal identity, through both the ubiquity and the pressure of political power. Boryana—or the actress Chichikova—has huge eyes that seem made for the epithet “soulful”; the character’s gaze is marked by a rueful detachment from the world around her, a contemptuous defiance of the lies and constraints on which daily life under a repressive regime is based. It’s a look that’s turned inward, maintaining watch over her intimate life as it rots in isolation from the world around her, and even over her inner physical life, her very body, as it betrays her. “Viktoria” is a story of love and its byways and diversions, which result from the titanic clash between the external power of politics and the equally powerful imperatives of the body.

Physical connections made and broken, the most intimate sense of selfhood and self-alienation in terms of a woman’s body, are the core of the film, and Vitkova’s images have a powerfully intimate physicality to match. She realizes richly textured pictures of piquant imbalances and dynamic proximities and distances, captures the tones and conflicts of daily life with a light but intricate domestic choreography. Early in the film, a simple scene of Boryana brushing her teeth in the bathroom, while her husband finishes his shower, is done with a compact complexity of action that makes it seem like a turbulent street scene, its mixed emotions whirling about amid the jangled angularities of the tense and tight space. She displays a poetic sense of the power of repetition, as with recurring shots (both puckishly frontal and disorientingly overhead), transformed by their contexts and moods, of a car pulling into the apartment courtyard.

It’s as if “Viktoria” were filmed in the grammatical feminine; it’s one of the great recent films by a woman about women, and it casts Vitkova to the forefront of contemporary filmmakers. Her inventiveness, her confessional and technical audacity, her emotional and historical insight, the unity of her dramatic and aesthetic sensibilities, make the film a treasure of the current cinema. All the more astonishingly, it’s Vitkova’s first feature; all the more dismayingly, it has been sitting on the shelf for two years, after premièring at Sundance in 2014. It’s the first Bulgarian film to be shown at Sundance and one of the few Bulgarian films to be shown in the United States at all. It may take a movie industry to give rise to a movie artist, but it takes one great director to press ahead and open the artistic spaces in which other filmmakers can let their own imagination run free. On the basis of “Viktoria” alone, the Bulgarian cinema has a bright future.