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 ...
It's been sometime since Trisha passed away and Barbs now works full time at "Happy Endings" funeral home. She is in love with her boyfriend Greg, even though he is married. She breaks off that relationship when he hits her. On top of that when she also loses her best friend, Barbs decides to embark on a conversion therapy. She removes her breasts and starts to live again as Bobby. In the camp called Way of Light, she undergoes various activities, including a night out to a bar, that will cure her sexual identity. But when Bobby is raped by the therapy priest, Bobby quits the program, leaving the camp in tears. He wants to move back to being Barbs and meets Michael Angelo, who is Trisha's ex-boyfriend. The two fall in love soon after, but he also turns out to be married. This time Barbs decides to give in, seeing that he is not hiding her from his wife and somehow the wife has also given in. Greg comes back into picture, pleads to take him back and Barb decides to get back with him. She is now dating both and the night that the two men find out truth, Barbs has another shocker in store, when a girl shows up pregnant claiming to be carrying bobby's baby from the night he had sex with a prostitute during his conversion therapy days. With three people vying for Barbs attention, she decides to not make a choice and offer them all her love and support.
Eventually this film is a story about boundless love, courage in speaking your truth, and acceptance by living your authentic self. Barbs is unapologetic about her sexuality and knows her wants and desires, a bold defiance against male-centric traditions and a firm declaration of queer identity. It is not serious and uses humour to take on serious issues, such as homophobia and non-monogamous relationship. It doesn't intend to solve anything, but instead opens up conversations generally considered taboo. I was actually surprised with how different the film was from its prequel, which showed more of an emotional story. Some humour occasionally fell flat but overall it was decent. Its sequences strung together like episodes of a sitcom rather than a feature length film. Barbs, mama Flora and the other girls keep the proceedings lively and the 2 boyfriends bring in the added hotness. The whole pregnant angle was unnecessary in my opinion. But the scattered plot brilliantly converges towards a single point, which is to celebrate the limitlessness of loving.
Despite its tiny flaws, Born Beautiful has a humongous heart. It's confident, funny and refuses to be contained by morality. The prequel asked for acceptance, this time around, not everyone will die beautiful, but everyone was born beautiful and deserves to live beautiful. (7/10)
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