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 ...
Martin is sent by his father to retrieve some family document from the family of his deceased grandfather on the southern coast. His closest friend Tomaso decides to join him. They stay at their father’s beach house during this cold time. Almost first hour of the film focuses on the boys randomly walking streets of deserted town, killing time, drinking and smoking and finally picking up certain other young girls and a boy for an evening full of drinking. The next day when Martin goes to the family house again for the second time and has made some progress compared to the first visit, is when he asks Tomaso if the guy back at home is his boyfriend? This is the first time the boys openly talk about Tomaso being gay. Tomes tell Martin everything. More conversations follow before what’s expected happens. Both the boys realize that their feelings for each other might have been more than friends and its time to explore each other as lovers.
This film could have been so much better as a short film or something that would focus on something more concrete. Shaky frames, hand-held cameras, awkward pauses, sharp focus on faces, blue sky, aimlessly wandering; all this become a little too much too handle after a while and you wanna scream for the film to move ahead. The performances of the actors of average at the best but in my opinion, there was only so much they could do. The basic fault lies with the director and the script. This experiment is too much of a self-indulgent where the viewers are taken for a joyride without testing or caring for what they would expect.
There are a lot better teenage coming-out stories which keep you interested and you feel for the characters as well. This one unfortunately doesn’t come anywhere closer to anything. (3/10)
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