Review: Quinceañera

Echo Park teen Leslie Campos invited her next-door neighbors to photograph her quinceañera, a traditional festivity for celebrating a Latina’s 15th birthday. Part of L.A.’s gay gentry, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland worked this rite of passage into a Sundance-feted indie that begins with one quinceañera and ends with another. Ludicrous elongated white Hummer limos ferry both girls and their respective courts, but co-writers and co-directors Glatzer and Westmoreland opt for a less ostentatious vehicle. They cite kitchen-sink realism—a Northern England school of filmmaking from the fifties and sixties—as their model. Their own schooling came via reality TV and porn videos, though neither style informs this touching, observant tale about “non-penetrative conception,” as a gynecologist classifies this uncommon route to pregnancy. 14-year-old Magdalena (Emily Rios) cannot fit into the re-stitched quinceañera gown passed along from her one-year-older cousin. This is after Magdalena’s boyfriend got halfway between third base and home, getting her pregnant on a technicality. Her preacher dad won’t believe she didn’t “go all the way” and throws her out of the house, while her mother sees “a miracle.” Magdalena’s cholo cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia) is thrown out of his sister’s quinceañera. He was earlier thrown out of his house after his parents learned he cruised gay-porn sites on the Internet. He’s taken in by his great-great uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), whose new landlords are gay Anglos very much like the filmmakers (one is a Brit). Carlos borrows a wrench to fix a clogged kitchen sink (what else?) and starts a three-way with the couple. “You live in a whole other world, don’t you?” notes one yuppie, after getting a lesson in gang hand signs. “No. You do,” corrects Carlos. Scoring some easy hits on their own kind, Glatzer and Westmoreland admit they’ve yet to learn much Spanish. Yet this neighborly pro-family drama savors the local color soon to vanish under rainbow banners. 90m. (Bill Stamets)