QUINCEANERA

Rating: 4

The QUINCEANERA is a coming-of-age celebration for Mexican girls in which they take the step from childhood to adulthood, a step from which there is no turning back. As observed today, there is painstaking attention to the rituals, but the underlying meaning as often as not, gets lost in the materialism of expensive clothes and stretch limos. There is a solemn religious service, formerly the focus of the celebration, followed by a big party where the girls get to dress up and everyone overindulges in dancing, feasting, and the sorts of family dramas that come of an open bar. The next day, life continues pretty much the way it had before. The QUINCEANERA celebrated in the film of the same name isn’t just the coming-of-age of Magdalena (Emily Rios), whose journey to that party, one that may or may not happen at all, supplies the plot. Nor is it the one her cousin celebrates at the beginning of the film in a traditional if non-reflective way. The actual QUINCEANERA involved is the seismic shift that is about to happen that will touch everyone in the film, and their beloved neighborhood, Echo Park, all of whom and which are on the verge of taking steps, large, small, sometimes unwilling, and occasionally shattering. This QUINCEANERA is symbolic, and from which, once commemorated, there is no turning back.

Magdalena is the daughter of a deeply spiritual but poor storefront preacher, thus, for reasons economic and philosophical, she is doomed, much to her chagrin, to a hand-me-down dress from her affluent cousin, and no stretch Hummer for her day of days. Those concerns pale in comparison to the news that she, despite being a virgin, is also pregnant, the former fact that no one believes, the latter, that her father, who can’t or won’t turn the other cheek or judge not lest he be judged, can’t forgive,. In short order, she’s thrown out of her house and takes refuge with her great-uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzales), a champurrado peddler, who has also taken in her cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), tossed from his family home for being gay.

Glatzer and Westmoreland use a mix of actors, professional and not, and a hand-held camera to give an uncanny sense of reality to the film, from the giddy chorus of Magdalena’s schoolgirl friends commenting on the action, to Tio Tomas’ landlords, a trendy upscale couple adding to the sudden gentrification of Echo Park and its inevitable change from an extended family to hip enclave of soaring real estate prices. In one, short, almost throwaway moment, they encapsulate it all with two newcomers extolling the rocking tamales that Magdalena’s mother sells, as her aunt walks by with the second-hand QUINCEANERA dress that she has altered. Here is tradition transformed and taken up by a new population without a glance at the ancillary culture. Things lost and found and made new and obsolete all at once.

It’s emblematic of the finely observed attention to detail throughout. The camera lingers over Tio Tomas’ sad, wise eyes as he listens to his family sort out their emotions, letting them figure it out for themselves with only a quiet word here and there to nudge them along. It is a tentative eavesdropper on trysts that will disrupt lives with their consequences, and the sorts of good-natured bickering that comes of close quarters. The dialogue reflects each person’s place in the changing society, from Spanglish to Anglo slang, it’s life as it is actually spoken, but subtly shaped to say more than the words themselves. Above all there is the luminous performance by Rios herself, unstudied, unselfconscious, and perfectly in tune to both Magdalena’s determination and her confusion in the face of what life has thrown at her.

QUINCEANERA is a revelation. A celebration of the good that comes of accepting change, and of the bittersweet regret of bidding farewell to the sweetness that was.