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 ...
A large group of people are part of Fujimi Orchestra. One day, out of blue, a musical genius Tounoin Kei shows up at the orchestra as the conductor of the group. The concert director of the group is Morimura Yuuki, who is in love with a female musician in the group. But turns out, she suddenly falls for Tounoin, which upsets Yuuki and he leaves the group. Tounoin takes him to his home to talk, but forcibly ends up raping him constantly saying that he loves him. The next morning, Yuuki is disgusted by the whole turn of events and avoids going to practice. The female musician invites Yuuki for a drink and confide in him that she knows he has been raped. She knows because Tounoin told him so, since they became close after he rejected her. She asks Yuuki that he should still consider coming back to practice because the group needs him and forget about his race for greater good. Yuuki swallows his pride and joins the group but his indifference hits Tounoin hard, who finds it hard to continue being the conductor. This is when in flashback, we find that Tounoin had long back heard Yuuki playing violin in a park and ever since has been looking for him, which led him eventually to join the orchestra. But Yuuki repeatedly tells him that he is not gay. The two men eventually burn their differences, not for love fo rah greater good of music, since somewhere deep down they both now feel that music connects them.
The story could have been so much better if somehow that rape scene could have been avoided and the story modified to show something else. Clearly Yuuki is not gay. There are various other ways to show a man's one sided love which he can sacrifice for greater good of music to show connection at more emotional/spiritual and musical level than a purely physical one, but keeping rape in there just makes everything questionable and not ok. And to top that, the female musician repeatedly saying that getting raped is not a big thing and that Yuuki should just forget it since it affects the whole group is just not ok. How could she even suggest that, just because Yuuki is a man. Would she feel the same if gender was reversed. I couldn't believe that scene. Agreed that Tounoin left everything behind to search for his love but raping him in name of love and then trying to prove to the audience that not everyone is blessed with having someone who is loved with such intensity makes it further wrong. Keeping that aside, the actors did their part right and acted well. The production was small and simple. But none of thee things can make up for a morally wrong screenplay. I am all for new ideas and pushing boundaries, but I draw a line at this. (3.5/10)
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