I’ve
been a bit remiss in properly getting to it in print form, but I like
to think that my indolence has been at least somewhat counterbalanced
by sincere word-of-mouth. Over the past couple weeks, whenever anyone
asked me about an off-the-beaten-path film or just the best of what I’d
recently seen and what was forthcoming, one film as much as any other
came tumbling from my lips.
Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, that film is Quinceañera, a little curio that starts out as what seems like a bit of a cultural jerk-off, an awkward mash-up of teen melodrama and Larry Clark’s predilections for minority youth culture and shirtless young boys. It quickly blossoms, though, into something better, richer and deeper —
a movie marked by a rarely glimpsed authenticity with respect to its
specificity of setting, fully-dimensional young characters and ethnic
particularization.
Set in Los Angeles’ Echo Park area, where actors who can’t afford
the Hollywood Hills’ rents and other arty types live alongside a
cross-section of blue-collar Latino families, Quinceañera
centers on Magdalena (Emily Rios, above left), the teenage daughter of
a storefront preacher who is just a few months away from her 15th
birthday, a cultural touchstone. She frets about her parents being
unable to afford the comparative extravagances of her cousin’s party,
but soon another problem rears it head. Magdalena is pregnant, though
she swears to her mother — and we’re inclined to believe her —
that she and her boyfriend, Ernesto (Jesus Castanos), haven’t had sex.
Eventually, though, Magdalena is bounced out of her home by her angry,
disgraced father.
Champion “black sheep” status, however, won’t come easily for
Magdalena, as her hotheaded cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia, above right)
wears that crown in the family. Carlos lives with his
great-great-uncle, Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), a weathered but unbowed old
man who makes his living selling champurrado on the street from a
little pushcart. In a development that takes a bit of getting used to
because, you realize, it feels so intimately ripped from real life,
Carlos falls into a relationship with a nearby affluent, white gay
couple — comprised of Londoner Gary (David Ross) and the slightly older
and less sensitive James (Jason Wood) — who are pioneers of
gentrification in the neighborhood. Is Carlos gay? Feeling the first
pangs of such a realization? Submitting to so-called “gay-for-pay”?
Answers are a bit slow developing, but pleasingly so — not rushed or
artificial.
As Magdalena’s pregnancy grows more visible, she and Carlos find
refuge with Tomas, and pull together as a sort of family within a
family. But with the economics of the neighborhood turning against them
and James’ jealousy spurring a vindictive eviction, a crisis blooms.
Glatzer (America’s Next Top Model) and Westmoreland (Gay Republicans)
are a somewhat unlikely pair, but they elicit from Rios and Garcia two
fantastic, beautifully rooted performances, and Gonzalez also exudes a
suitably well-worn charisma. Poetically real, Quinceañera
is alternately rich, heartbreaking and full of the sort of dramatic
tension — the peaks and valleys — one finds in real life. In release
now in New York and Los Angeles, and
expanding to other cities throughout the month, this is one of the
summer’s best independent films; for more information, visit its Web site by clicking here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 90 mins.)