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 ...
After a few minutes into the film (About 30 minutes or so), I could not take this movie any more. The lead character's meeting new a person in a different city, one after the other, was becoming too much of a problem for me. I just did not care anymore of where he is going to go next and who is he going to meet. And when you stop caring about what the characters do in their film, there is very little to hold your interest in the film.Breaking off concurrent relationships with an older woman and her son, we are introduced to Daniel, as he prances around London thinking he's God's gift to man and woman. But his freewheeling existence is put into question when his eccentric grandmother, the one person he genuinely cares for, sends him on a wild-goose chase to locate her father's grave. Traveling through Paris, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade in Serbia and Sofia in Bulgaria, he learns a thing or two about life. He meets new people in every country and invariable forms some sort of sexual relationship with them irrespective of their gender. He discovers that feelings of true romantic love can exist, even for someone who can't reciprocate. He also receives valuable history lessons about his Jewish heritage, which in the past meant very little to him.
As I mentioned before, the moviegoer might find himself trapped and wearied by this repetitively stop-and-go script. What could have been a point of focus feels almost hackneyed by the conclusion. Some changes in Daniel's personality are illustrated nicely. It humbles him to a point where he begins to take pride in his heritage and what his great-grandfather had done to help preserve it. Nevertheless, Daniel is quiet about his new consciousness. The actor playing the part of Daniel does his job fine but when the script itself is flawed, the actors cannot get above the rest. By the time the frustratingly silly ending arrives, it's confirmed that "Shem," which translates to "name" in Hebrew, is just as confused as its protagonist.
If you have been liking the kind of films that I like, then you might want to stay away from this one. (2/10)
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Cheers.