August 17-23, 2006

Movies

15 to Life

A young girl's coming of age reflects a neighborhood's changing face.

by Cindy Fuchs

But as soon as his father Walter (Johnny Chavez) sees Carlos' face, the effort is over. "I told you not to be around this family anymore." Within seconds, Carlos is literally kicked to the curb, escorted by a bouncer and humiliated before his family. Months earlier, Walter caught his son looking at gay porn sites on the Internet, at which point Carlos went to live with his great-great-uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez). Though he's working at a carwash, Carlos imagines another life, in part suggested by Tomas' backyard on Waterloo Street, adorned with colored glass, baskets and metals, shrines to saints and family members.

At Tomas', past and present overlap. When Carlos asks why Tomas has never married, the old man smiles: "Back in Mexico, I had a couple of close calls." His decision to care for his ailing mother instead suggests Tomas' inclinations — to look after others, especially family members, before himself. Providing a model for saintly generosity, Tomas soon opens his home to another relative kicked out of her home, Carlos' cousin Magdalena (Emily Rios).

At first Carlos and Magdalena argue: The space is tight, he seems disrespectful, and she's struggling with her father Pastor Ernesto's (Jesus Castanos) disapproval over her pregnancy. Just weeks before Magdalena's own quinceañera, for which her aunt has offered to adjust Eileen's pretty white dress, she learns that she's pregnant by her college-bound boyfriend Herman (J.R. Cruz), even though they both insist they've never had intercourse. While their parents don't believe them, the kids are more focused on immediate consequences: the loss of their future beyond the neighborhood. "I wanna see the world," says Herman. "I'm sick of Echo Park." Magdalena nods, "I'm sick of it too."

Echo Park provides a multifaceted background for this multigenerational saga. Its gentrification is embodied by Tomas' newest landlords, Gary (David W. Ross) and James (Jason L. Wood). Their interest in Carlos as a sexual third is premised on their class and ethnic distance from their tenants (the characters lapse into stereotypical behaviors, especially during party scenes), which only underlines the problem of property in the Park.

Carlos first accommodates his short-time lovers, then takes a bit of revenge when they not only dump him but also evict Tomas. But Quinceañera doesn't press very hard at the racism of the gay boys' dalliance (one of them develops a crush on Carlos, suggesting he sees past their "differences," or at least feels bored by his older boyfriend), and it doesn't resolve or even articulate some compelling problems. Still, it makes a kind of socioeconomic analysis in its representations of limitations and aspirations, most cogently in its sexual politics.

Both cast off as "liars," Magdalena and Carlos assume each another's truths; he helps her to research her virginal pregnancy on the net, while she, unlike everyone else in the family but Tomas, never judges Carlos, though she does wonder about the activity with his "special friends": "Are you the peanut butter in the sandwich?" Suddenly, her desire for a Hummer limo on the night of her quinceañera seems childish. Herman's mother sends him away to live with relatives so he might continue his promising academic career, and Magdalena turns to Carlos, who feels similarly cast off, for emotional support. "Somebody's got to be a father to that child," he asserts. "I'm going to get a real job that's not a total fucking dead end."

His conception of such mobility takes Carlos a step beyond the schoolkids and street punks who populate the neighborhood. While Magdalena's friends fashion their identities from the consumer products available to them, so do Gary and James decorate their apartment to reflect their current self-images. Carlos sees himself differently, as part of a family. When Magdalena's clothes no longer fit her, he offers her one of his oversized plaid shirts to wear, a gesture that unites them but also marks them as a next generation, less rigid in their expectations.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)