Quinceanera (R)
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A popular item at Sundance, where it won two major awards, this delightfully saucy, heartfelt tale of sex, real estate, and more or less immaculate conception in Echo Park edges as close to a complex view of L.A. Latino life as could be hoped for from white-boy filmmakers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, who moved into the neighborhood, got an invite to photograph a 15-year-old girl’s coming-of-age ceremony, and saw the kernel of a movie. Intended, a trifle oddly, as a tribute to 1960s English kitchen-sink drama (particularly to Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, whose plot it freely plunders), the movie turns on the testy efforts of a pregnant teen (newcomer Emily Rios) and her gay, borderline delinquent cousin (Jesse Garcia) to hang on to their Mexican identity while growing up American. Set in a community under siege by gentrification, Quiñceanera neither skirts nor condescends to the difficulties faced by those in poor urban neighborhoods. Shooting with an unobtrusive handheld camera and with copious help from their own neighbors, Glatzer and Westmoreland offer a vital slice of Latino life--minus drug dealers, racist cops, and gun-waving street gangs. The movie has a giddy, improvised feel and a loving sense of place. (Ella Taylor)
Review by Ella Taylor
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