Viva Verdi! (2024)

Unrated, but this is as tame of a film as you can imagine.  It's a sweet story about retirees who all share a history of music.  If you are being incredibly crass --and I beg of you to examine yourself --one of the outfits that one of the subjects of the documentary wears is more revealing than she's aware of.  There's no sexual content in this and could be viewed by any audience.  At most, there is discussion about the role of mortality.

DIRECTOR: Yvonne Russo

Oh man, if I wasn't exhausted, this would be one of the cheeriest blogs I've had in a while.  I mean, this is one of those weird writing assignments that I'm doing because it's up for Best Song.  It's not going to win.  Absolutely "Golden" is going to win.  But, once in a blue moon, one of the Best Song category movies actually ends up being a decent movie.  I understand why it didn't make "Best Documentary Feature", mainly because it's more adorable than impressive.  But sometimes an adorable movie needs to be enjoyed and if it takes a "Best Song" nomination to get eyes on this movie, then who really cares?

Maybe there are only so many themes that we can talk about.  Perhaps because I'm now middle-aged that stories about how people confront the end tend to make their way into my view.  (That sentence got away from me.) I don't want to make a blanket statement and say that Viva Verdi! is the movie that redefined the aging doc.  If anything, Viva Verdi! is super safe and by the book, if I was really breaking the movie down. But Yvonne Russo made something that somehow hits me harder than a lot of the other movies that try to take on the same concept.  Part of it comes from the fact that the English teacher side of me has been aggressively defining my day-to-day.  I've been really riding the "Embrace your Passions" attitudes for the past few years.  Since Covid, I've been reading a ton more.  This blog is an attempt to watch everything in the hopes that I live a fuller life.  I know.  Some people climb Everest.  I write a blog about art.  But there is something truly beautiful about the artist and Viva Verdi! kind of captures not only kindred spirits, but people who pulled off my dream.

I know.  I shouldn't be so jazzed to try to get into a retirement home at my age.  I just think that the folks as Casa Verdi kind of changed the tone on what it means to grow old.  Yes, there are people in this movie who are very sad.  Aging has to bring with it an exhaustion about the end.  Lord knows that I'm already feeling that.  But this is potentially the most upbeat story of people facing their twilight years that I've seen outside of fiction.  I'm not exactly making a huge leap to say that the thing that is coloring such happiness is the fact that these are artists who continue to do the thing that motivated them their entire lives: create art.

My mom is the age of a lot of the people in this movie.  (I think my mom looks younger than a lot of the folks in Casa Verdi, but that's a different story.)   I worry about her a lot.  She's a retired widow and I don't really see her find a lot of purpose in the day-to-day.  Golly, I hope that this doesn't get back to her, but there seems to be a desperation that I never saw in her for some kind of purpose.  I don't know if I can give her that purpose.  She was a nurse for her entire life.  When you retire from nursing, you don't really continue doing anything medical --outside of being on the receiving end of medical procedures.  The residents at Casa Verdi, however, while physically looking older, don't seem to have that existential angst that my mom has.  These are people who have held onto these gifts that I thought would start fading given their respective ages.  In a million years, I wouldn't have thought that 90-year-old ladies could still be professional opera singers.  I used to listen to these Doctor Who audios done by the original cast members from the '60s.  They sound old.  But in the case of these performers, because they have taken such great care of their instruments, they don't really seem to miss a beat.

​Okay, they maybe miss a beat here-and-there. (Note: Weebly went down and lost a bunch of my writing at this point.  I'm not sure what is going to be repetitive and what isn't.  Also, because of the website being down, I now have the worst backlog I've had in a long time.  Yay.)   There's a heartbreaking moment when an opera singer of advanced years is crushing it.  She's hitting these notes that you wouldn't think a 90-year-old could hit and, at the climax of the piece, her voice gives out.  This was a central plot point of KPop Demon Hunters, so this isn't exactly something unrealistic.  I just thought that all voices kind of faded over time.  I listen to these Doctor Who audio plays, performed by the original cast members in a lot of cases.  Doctor Who started in 1963, and there are still actors playing the same roles.  But their voices have changed over time.  Part of the ask is that the audience has to understand that these people have aged with time as well.  Still, while watching Viva Verdi!, you wonder what makes a professional singer able to hold onto that quality of voice that should have gone with the time.

That end swept the rug from out under me.  I know that this was made in 2024, but the realisation that this movie was made a few years before it premiered was heartbreaking.  If this is a study of mortality