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 ...
Tchaikovsky was very young when he was sent to boarding school. Having lost his mother at the young age of 14, he started training in music and soon starts getting popular. When he becomes a college professor, he meets his first love who inspires him to compose for Romeo & Juliet, but eventually he dies after few years of cholera. Incidentally Tchaikovsky's brother is also gay and they both along with other popular artists spend time as themselves in an underground gay club. After years of promiscuity, at some point he starts fearing that public knowledge of his sexuality would be the end of his career and he could get arrested, he decides to get married as a cover. He meets Antonina, who apparently has ben in love with him and proposes her. But as expected he can't be a husband and soon flees to Italy. He finds a wealthy patroness via chat who is more than happy to cover for all his expenses as she shares common love for his music. In Europe, Tchaikovsky's compositions flourish and be becomes a world famous composer. Dejected in love by everyone, his last few years are spent with. his nephew in a remote village where he breathes his last at age 53 because of cholera.
Apparently, whether Tchaikovsky's death was suicide or natural is still a mystery, but it was interesting to understand the life of a musician. Personally, I had never heard the name but the fact that it is a true story and how scandalous it could be to be gay in Russia in 1800's is truly unfathomable. That way the drama was quite interesting but there was a lot of music pieces too, which is totally legit since he is a composer but personally thats just not my cup of tea. I would have preferred a full fledged film on his life. Surprisingly, most of the film focuses only on his sexuality, which I am not complaining about; but for a true biography, it would be nice to know other aspects of his life too. A person cannot just be defined by his sexuality. Sure, the sexuality defines the character but thats not all. The production values were quite good and so was direction and acting. Essentially all the parts that were actually filmed as film were interesting.
Know that this is docu-drama an not a full fledged feature film. If you are not into classical music, you will enjoy the film a lot more if someone can bring us a version with the long music pieces. (5/10)
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