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 ...
The film moves at a very fast pace. We see his earlier days in theatre, how he manages to befriend a few people dreaming of making films. He moves from different actors, characters and people while terrorizing everyone on the sets to make a movie the way he wanted it to look. We see how he was openly gay, sexually very promiscuous, a man who wanted to defy all norms of film making and a drug addict. You know that the film is not going to end well for a person with al these traits. With a life dedicated to cinema, churning out three to five films per year, a devout cinephile, promiscuous homosexual, and conflicted Marxist, his live-fast-die-young lifestyle was the stuff of a rock star, not a director.
Sadly the film never goes into the psyche of the person that Ould make you either appreciate him or hate him or even just understand better. You watch this film and you feel like you are watching a self absorbed guy who yells at everyone, has sex all around, does a lot of coke and somewhere in between finds time to make 3-5 films a year. How was he funding these films, where were the story ideas coming from, why were the actors dying to work for him when clearly his reputation was never the best; is never touched upon. Interestingly, this biography itself is shot in a mix of theatre, half-in, half-out experiments kind of film; which is how apparently all of Fassbinder films used to be like. The sets and location are bare minimum with complete focus on just the actors. We also get to see the few relationships that he was in with other guys. But as I said, never anything is explored in details. The film is mainly interested in what a monumental jerk Fassbinder could be, treating theater companies, film crews, actors, producers, lovers, and family members like obstacles, raw material, or garbage, depending. This is not my kind of cinema unfortunately. (2.5/10)
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