Quinceanera is Spanish for "15 year-old girl" and for the elaborate and expensive party that celebrates latinas' reaching that milestone. The film opens in the middle of one such party, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. It's Eileen's 15th but our attention is directed mostly towards her cousin, the sulky Magdalena (Emily Rios). She's worried about whether her boyfriend likes someone else and whether her upcoming "15th" will be as lavish as her cousin's. Blocks away, a young man with a neck tatoo steals a bouquet of flowers. He's Eileen's brother Carlos (Jesse Garcia), whose appearance at the ball is cause for consternation. His own father violently kicks him out. Carlos lives with his great-uncle Tomas, an affable octogenerian vendor of "champurrado" (spiced hot chocolate), in the back house of a property recently purchased by a 30-something gay couple. A plot development I'd rather not reveal causes Magdalena to be exiled from home by her religious father. She moves in with uncle Tomas and Carlos and the three form a makeshift family. But what of Magdalena's quinceanera?
This little gem was only the second film in the history of the Sundance Festival to win both the Grand Jury and the Audience awards. Writer/directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer were inspired by the "kitchen sink" dramas common in Westmoreland's native Britain during the late 50s and early 60s, with Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey providing the blueprint. Yet Echo Park is a more cheerful place than that film's environs and Quinceanera is firmly based on the filmmakers' own life experience. Like the gay couple in the film, they are partners who moved into a refurbished property in Echo Park a few years ago. Their Mexican-American neighbors asked them to serve as official photographers for their daughter's quinceanera. During months of preparations, they became intimately familiar with Mexican culture, and fascinated with how the event mixes religious and pagan rituals, as well as classic and modern elements.
The resulting film is anchored by Carlos and Magdalena's bittersweet coming-of-age stories, but it also manages to incorporate with great fluidity and economy issues of class, race, religion and sexual orientation. Particularly laudable is the frank manner in which Glatzer and Westmoreland address how gentrification has changed the neighborhood's character and caused an exodus of the more vulnerable older residents. The gentrification of established, centrally located, ethnic neighborhoods affects most major American cities; a phenomenon that's happening more rapidly than anticipated because of the higher cost of commuting from the suburbs. I can't recall offhand another movie that makes gentrification so central to its plot, and that confronts its most dire implications.
I also can't recall a better film about our largest minority. Quinceanera is more ambitious, or more polished, or fresher, or simply more effective than the rivals worth mentioning: Stand and Deliver, The Perez Family, My Family, Mi Vida Loca, The City, Real Women Have Curves, Raising Victor Vargas and Manito. It's a breakthrough film for Westmoreland, who's directed mostly gay porn and gay docs, and Glatzer (the campy Grief was his forgettable debut) . The Fluffer, a drama marketed almost exclusively as "queer cinema", was their promising first collaboration. Quinceanera evidences more skillful writing and direction. One wonders to what extent to credit executive producer Todd Haynes who is, in my opinion, one of our best filmmakers. Last but not least, the film's appeal is dependent on the affecting performances by debutants Rios and Garcia, and by Chalo Gonzalez, who was discovered by Peckinpah decades ago during the shooting of The Wild Bunch and finally, in his 81st year, gets to play a major character.
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