This is your typical indie coming-of-age tale about a teenager, though it’s clearly working with a very tiny budget. Set within a migrant family living in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, the movie digs into how fragile old-school traditions and expectations can be. We follow a teenage son as he goes through the process of coming out and struggles to find acceptance while dealing with homophobia, domestic abuse, and a messy love triangle that involves his own sister. Goyo is seventeen and just about to graduate from high school. Since he’s been a bit more feminine since he was a little kid, he’s always had to deal with emotional and physical transition from his dad, Ramon, who is obsessed with him being "a man." The only real love he gets is from a lady next door who actually respects him for who he is. The family lives in a Mexican community where everyone works on a grape farm, but things get shaken up when a new guy named Lucio arrives. Lucio basically seduces Goyo ...
This film was weird. It was just going nowhere. Looking at the poster, you might think that it might be somewhat like Summerstorm but it doesn't even come close. This is one of those really bad foreign / independent films where all that happens is bicycle riding. Trust me, thats exactly what they show for a good 30-40% of the initial time in the film.
2 young men Johann 7 Robin are on a train bound for some country-side experience. Half of the film just focuses on them and their adventures of biking in the woods. When their bikes get ultimately stolen, they look for shelter and find a 40s woman with her son. The woman is interested in gay men but her son is not. He is just used to being a bored teenage who just does random things to kill his time. Then random things happen. The 2 boys spent sometime with mother and son and then go back to woods. And then something happens in which one of the boy either gets lost or killed or something. It is not very clear.
Trust me, the film was exact;y as boring and ridiculous as you must have felt reading the storyline above. This film seemed to go nowhere, slowly and randomly. The film was full of bits and pieces of this and that. Sun shining through the trees as they ride bikes through the woods, S&M in the woods, robbing sandwiches from other bike riders in the woods were some of the scenes that made the film. This is one of the slowest films and bad films I have seen and i have seen a lot of bad films.
Completely avoidable. (1/10)
Comments
The only really fascinating about it was that big empty airplane runway or whatever it was out in the middle of nowhere. I even went to the extent of searching through that entire area via Google Earth to see if I could find it and understand what it was, but, no such luck. It, like the meaning of this movie, remains a mystery.
Anyway, you are right, a film to not spend much time on--watching or thinking about!