I liked Quinceañera - quite a lot, actually - so please forgive me that my first comment is a rather significant criticism: I'm aware that there is this thing called "Mexican-American culture." I suppose that I don't know a lot about it, but I know that it exists, and that Mexican-Americans tend to be poorer as a group than e.g. white people. Which means that you really don't need to make the first thirty minutes of your ninety-minute film a goggling ethnography of a minority group that lives in the United States. It's bad enough to make Exotic Others out of people who live halfway across the world - it's screamingly offensive when you do that to communities that live about two miles from any person likely to see your art-house flick.

So, besides being a bugs-in-a-jar look at a Latino community in Echo Park, Los Angeles, what is Quinceañera? A rather sweet and delightful look at a couple of outcasts learning to depend on each other.

Magdalena (Emily Rios) is fast approaching her 15th birthday and with it her quinceañera, what amounts to a "Sweet Sixteen" party only one year earlier and with significant religious overtones. For a long time, very little plot happens. Instead we are introduced to her large family: a preacher father, a domestic mother, siblings, cousins, and most significantly her eccentric bachelor uncle Tio Tomas (Chalo González) and her gay cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia).

Now, I'm as much of a fan of slice-of-life films as anyone can be: take a batch of characters, add the bare minimum conflict, steep for two hours. But Quinceañera drops the ball in a big way in its first third, and that brings me back to the start of this essay: I am aware that there is this thing called "Mexican-American culture."

White male writing, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm pretty much done with the pious political correctness of films and TV shows and novels et cetera that take as their theme: "we're all the same, really." Yes, we are. And maybe it's a generational thing, but I don't need to be told that. I don't need entire films dedicated to proving that idea. Now, that's the kind of film Quinceañeara is for the first act: a balancing act between "look at how WEIRD these Mexican-American traditions are!" and "awww, these Mexican-Americans are just like us!"

The writer-directors, so you know, are two white men, one American and one British.

Rarely indeed do I ever say, "and then, thank God, the plot started," but I shall here. Magdalena has a boyfriend (J.R. Cruz) who gets her pregnant without actually having sex with her, in what the film takes pains to assure us is a possible, though unlikely happening. Her extremely religious family (because they are Mexican-American!) holds no truck with this, and so she leaves, to live with Tio and Carlos in the tiny little coach house Tio has rented for decades.

And here we find a Rule of Narrative: to show us that "they" are just like "us," don't beat us over the head with their other-ness, just tell a story about them. It's the exact reason that Brokeback Mountain is worth more than every other gay-themed film put together: it's a love story about gay men, rather than a gay men's story about love.

What Quinceañera becomes at this point is a cute little fable about misfit children learning about life from a wise old man who knows much more than they do. Rios, Garcia and González have a very affecting chemistry, and when the film is about them and their struggles, it improves considerably. It is not without cliché (and the depiction of teenage society is clearly being written by men who are not teenagers), but it is effective anyway. Even the ethnography becomes palatable: the streets of Echo Park become a character, and the story of white gentrification forcing out the old ethnic order is much more successful when we have real characters to tie it to. The primary story through which this is metaphorically constructed, Carlos' entanglement with the white neighbors who like to keep Latin boys on hand for threesomes (writer-director-lovers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland deny any autobiographical intent, and not knowing them I will believe it; but in that case it might have been wise for one of the neighbors not to have been British), is shockingly unexploitive, although if I described it at length I'm sure it would sound that way.

The film shows its budget in the generally lackluster cinematography and the weak performances of the cast outside of the main three, but it doesn't really matter much. The central relationship is well-captured and that's all that matters - the script won't support a broad study of a culture, but it does "chamber drama" very nicely indeed, and that gives it a great application than any broad study could possibly hope for, anyway. It's a tiny but real tragedy that turns into a tiny but real celebration of human strength in the face of adversity. Dare I say it: it's universal.

7/10