Quinceañera

More soap-opera silly than authentically gritty, Quinceañera springs from the heads of writer/director team Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer as a loving tribute to the Los Angeles neighborhood where they make their home, Echo Park. A quinceañera is basically a girl’s lavish, stops-out 15th-birthday party, and the film is bookended by them. It’s part coming-of-age story, but it’s mostly a self-conscious gentrification drama, showing how the arrival of well-off white folks (including, presumably, the guys who made this movie) starts to move tectonic plates in the old Latino neighborhood. It’s good-hearted and gets a lot of mileage out of solid performances by unknown actors, most notably Jesse Garcia as a wifebeater-bedecked cholo who has an unlikely thing going on with the gay couple that owns his property. It’s also flabby, with a weird subplot indicating a forthcoming virgin birth and cloying reaction shots from resident wise-old-man Chalo Gonzáles meant to guide audience sentiment. This is my first year at Sundance, but I suspect this is an ideal Sundance film. You cut it some slack in the thin mountain air, but it’s unlikely to make much of a connection in the world below.