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Trailer for "Quinceañera"

Named after a Latino festivity celebrating the 15th birthday of a girl, the point at which she is said to become a woman, Quinceañera is a quietly observed story of life in a community of Mexican-Americans in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. The film opens with one such celebration for a girl whose parents can afford an above-average party, and we see it through the eyes of her cousin Magdalena (Emily Rios), who is dreaming of an even more ostentatious celebration of her own. Her dream says Hummer limo, but the family budget says hand-me-down-gown. The discussion seems to hit a brick wall when she is discovered to be pregnant and her god-fearing father refuses to believe her claim that she is still a virgin. (Which she technically is.) She runs away to the house where her great-uncle lives, a ramshackle but comfortable place that is also refuge to Magdalena’s cousin Carlos, who has created the even greater sin of being gay.

Quinceañera was written and directed on a short schedule and minimal budget by directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, who by all indications are gay. (Westmoreland’s experience has been in gay porn; the duo collaborated previously on the gay-themed drama The Fluffer.) They based the film on their own experiences living in a primarily Latino district of Los Angeles, and I mention their sexuality only because it forms such a large subtext of the film. The neighborhood is being gentrified, largely by gay couples who seem as interested in the roughish trade of “Latin boys” as they do in cheap real estate. It’s an unflattering portrait of a milieu they can be presumed to know, although propaganda of any sort is the furthest thing from the film’s mind. Quinceañera recalls the “kitchen sink” realism of early 1960s British dramas like A Taste of Honey, and the films of Ken Loach, albeit lighter in nature. It’s nothing earthshaking, but offers a likeable glimpse into another way of American life.