Viva Riva is an electric action-thriller that just happens to be set in Democratic Republic of Congo. This setting is what sets it apart from many similar shoot-up films made each year.
Riva, a petroleum trafficker who has ripped off his own crew, returns to his hometown of Kinshasa to sell a truck full of petrol at a time when gas is so scarce it can be sold for 8 bucks a liter. Upon his return, rolling high on his new riches, he falls in love with the local gangster’s girlfriend, Nora. Simultaneously, Cesar, who Riva stole the oil from is in hot pursuit, trying to recover hist lost product and seek revenge on his betrayer. Riva beats out the gangster Azor for the girl, but it ends up having quite a high price as does the life of a criminal in DRC.
The plot is solidly developed and expertly executed. Any member of the creative team, I am sure, would do well working on the Die Hard franchise or the next Vin Diesel picture, and I mean that as a compliment. What makes the film worth writing about is the fact that we get a chance to see the city of Kinshasa through a more local lens. While the film’s writer / director, Djo Munga, was educated in Belgium, he makes Kinshasa the setting for his film as opposed to its subject. By this I mean, he is able to treat the action, characters and location as local rather than exotic. This in turn brings out the truth of the place and its characters. In a recent interview with cineuropa, the director said, “I wanted to show the Congo I knew, a modern and effervescent country, and avoid the temptation to hark back to the past, to a golden age rather stuck in time.” He succeeds and it is a pleasure to watch this perspective of a place that the west too often looks at through a very different lens.
