Director Peter Sollett ventures into virgin territory.

You may not think a middle-class twentysomething Italian Jewish New Yorker would get the nuances and cultural contradictions of a bunch of Latino kids on the Lower East Side. But you’d be wrong – Peter Sollett has pulled off exactly that in his first feature, Raising Victor Vargas, a street-smart ode to the bravura and bare-arsed vulnerability of being 17. It’s also an entirely convincing snapshot of young American Latino life in the 21st Century.

“I’m surprised by how narrow most cinematic versions of New York are, ‘cause if you’re from another place and you watched a bunch of movies about New York, you’d think it was all a Woody Allen movie,” Sollett tells Collective. Of the district he placed his story in, he says “peeling paint, holes punched in the walls - it’s a neighbourhood that feels the wear and tear of people moving into this country and struggling to get on, generation after generation. But it wasn’t the neighbourhood, it was the actor.”

In fact, there was a time when the Victor Vargas story was destined for the director’s own neck of the woods. Disheartened by child actors who according to Sollett “had forgotten their adolescence before they’d even experienced it”, he began to scout for non-professionals. Victor Rasuk, then 14, answered a flier he’d seen in the street and Sollett knew he’d found his leading man.

Closely leading his young cast through largely improvised performances, the director drew out the Victor Vargas in Rasuk: a lip lickin’ would-be Lothario walking the cracked paving of his ramshackle neighbourhood to a zugger-zugger hip-hop scratch. But Victor Vargas sidesteps ghetto clichés, trading dramatic devices like guns and drugs for a conflict with an old lady – Victor’s fearsome Dominican granny. Was Sollett ever tempted down that hackneyed route? “Well there’s a temptation to pull a gun out of a drawer every time you have a bad day of writing,” he confesses. Now that sounds like a man who takes his work seriously. Skye Sherwin 19 September 03

Raising Victor Vargas, on selected release 19 September 03.

useful link: www.raisingvictorvargas.com