We loved this film, winner of the 2006 Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize as well as the coveted Audience Prize. Realism prevails in locale (Echo Park, California) and language (mixture of Spanish and English). During filming, locals were pressed into service for the crowd scenes. The film underlines the slow gentrification of this old Spanish neighborhood: rising real estate prices forcing long-times residents to abandon their community.
The Quinceanera is the traditional 15th birthday celebration for girls in the Latino cultures. The photo above shows a typical Quinceanera "court", a sort of mixture of wedding and prom. This ritual can cost a family a lot of money: gown, tiara, flowers, DJ, food, hall rental, limo. The Quinceanera has religious aspects but those seem to get lost in the party atmosphere. Hilariously, this film opens with the entry of several couples at a Quinceanara - pretty girls and handsome boys - in a stately promenade to the Triumphal March from AIDA.
This is the story of Magdalena, played with perfect natural beauty by Emily Rios. As the time draws near for her Quinceanera, Magdalena finds her waistline inexplicably expanding. She is hauled off by her Mom for a pregnancy test and when it proves positive she is passionately denounced by her Bible-thumping preacher of a father - despite her protestations of virginity.
Magdalena has been fooling around with the handsome Herman (JR Cruz at the left in this photo) and although they never went 'all the way' the counselor at the clinic explains to Magdalena that things got close enough to result in a 'virgin pregnancy'. Confused and distraught, Magdalena leaves home and goes to live with her Tio Tomas and her cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia at right in the photo). Herman is sweet and kind to her - he doesn't really understand how she could be pregnant since they never 'did it' - but his Mom whisks him out of town rather than have her boy get tangled up with this pregnant-virgin stuff. At first chiding her cousin Carlos for being a deadbeat,
pot-smoking faggot, Magdalena eventually finds him to be her guardian angel.
Tio Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez) has lived for 28 years in a small house behind a larger house and surrounded by a magical garden which Tomas has transformed with glass bottles, painted and found objects into a little realm where he sits happily for hours enjoying the sun, the colours of the day, and his parrot.
A gay couple move into the big house and form a threesome with the willing Carlos; but when one of the couple starts seeing Carlos by himself privately it leads to a serious breach in the couple's relationship. Their solution to the problem is to remove Carlos from the scene by evicting Tio Tomas from his small domain. This results in a series of incidents which carry the film to its conclusion. Watch it and see how it works out!
The film speaks to me on so many levels, especially now that we live in a Spanish neighborhood where lovely girls like Magdalena seem to be tightrope-walking over a chasm where their attractiveness and desirability is offset by the need to maintain their virginity - or at least appear to. Heartbreakers like Herman are on every street corner up here, and there are plenty of handsome boys slyly eying the gay inhabitants from under their dark lashes. And there are so many people like Tio Tomas in the neighborhood: old and full of wisdom which they will gently impart to the younger generation if only they will stop to listen.
Another aspect of the film that gave me a direct link was the menage a trois: back in the late 1980s I tried that for a while; despite the surface thrill, it was an unhappy time for all three of us and it didn't last very long.
The most moving aspect of the film is the way Tio Tomas, Carlos and Magdalena become a family unit all on their own. Ousted by their parents for being gay or pregnant, Carlos and Magdalena come to develop a profound bond, while the kindly Tio Tomas has - thru his worlds of experience - come to realize that people are what they are, and he loves his wayward 'kids' in a simple, directly supportive way. Early in the film, the drunken Carlos tries to crash another cousin's quinceanera; immediately his father and the bouncer and the other men start beating up on him but Tio Tomas rescues the boy and quietly sends him home. The way Carlos defers to the old man's wishes is one of the most touching moments in the film.
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