I still have a long time to work on myself. I revisit “Love, Victor” every time I need a reminder that there is still (or at least was) common sense in the world. Despite their young age, the characters of the series make many wise actions: they are able to empathize with each other, know how to listen, can normally perceive criticism, make serious decisions and reflect on their consequences. Something that seems to have completely disappeared from the adult world.
Character lines are different from many other teen movies, where their actions are not taken to the extreme for the sake of visual morality: “Look what it leads to, and don’t do that.” Felix, who assumes the role of an adult in a relationship with a mentally ill mother, does not fall to the social bottom, but is able to accept help. Mia, who suffers from a sense of uselessness to her parents, does not break down, does not spoil the lives of others and herself, but tries to remain useful to her friends and arrange her own happiness. Pilar, even during a teenage protest, is able to support his boyfriend without turning his relationship into drama for the sake of drama. And so on, seventeen-year-old heroes solve their problems with greater success than thirty-year-olds and do not drag them into their future. In this regard, I can recommend this series as a psychotherapeutic tool to all adults (for those who are in favor of as many tens as you want) to re-examine their own relationships, for example, with a mother’s abuse (like Lake) or with problems in marriage (the stories of Victor’s parents as well as the story of Victor and Benji).
Over three seasons of finding a partner in the world, a group of teenagers barely yell at each other, let alone the stormy scandals you might hear from your neighbors behind the wall on any weekday. They talk about their feelings and it never occurs to anyone to put themselves and their opinions above others. They deal with homophobia among peers in the first season, and among parents in the second. After all, their life is not like a daily struggle with the whole world, but a thoughtful reflection, even as they rush to choose the right path.
Some may think this is implausible behavior. And, yes, it’s a far cry from my own teenage experience in the late ’90s, early ’00s, where the main scheme of survival in society was “attacking others so they don’t have time to attack you” (mm, what a familiar formulation). In that environment, it was difficult even to imagine that the neighbor does not plan every second of his life as if he would catch and pull out of someone else’s mouth a tidbit in the form of popularity, influence or potential future husband, or just money, a new purse or a ready-made homework.
The religious homophobic Isabelle; the untreated manic-depressive Don; the violent outbursts of Armando; the bitchy sparkling sister-in-law, Natalia; Tito’s grandfather, who tries to use his influence over relatives to stop progress he doesn’t understand; the mothers of Lake and Benji, who play to the public at the expense of their children; and all these people are products of their time. Once they stopped thinking with their heads and for the sake of survival, they accepted the framework imposed on them by some group of the population (parents/religious community/work collective, etc.) as the only template for organizing their own lives. This made them flawed and unable to go beyond the horizon of their place, defined by other people. What is Armando’s monologue worth in a bar when he actually complains that he doesn’t have a label for his son’s orientation and, after searching the Internet, finds not a manual, but a hundred new labels that only confuse him. While Victor needs to take it whole in the moment, rather than being classified as a rare exotic plant. Because Victor is more complex than a plant.
The series is beautiful in that none of the young characters want to be a plant, in other words, do not want to define themselves by one function: “mother”, “protector”, “careerist”, “macho”, “lover”, “ideal”. They look at each side of themselves and notice how their desires and needs change.