In the coming-of-age tale set in 1979, a boy named Olmo sits beside his secretive mother and his independent, chain-smoking elder sister, Ana (Rosa Armendariz), when his best friend appears carrying a record player. The quiet scene hardly screams climax, yet it clearly reveals that this story isn’t Olmo’s alone, and that his family functions as one boisterous organism of which the endearing lead (Aivan Uttapa) is simply a part.
Known for his explorations of adolescence in Mexico, the director Fernando Eimbcke’s sixth feature is his first set on the American side of the United States-Mexico border. Set in Las Cruces, N.M., the film follows Olmo — Spanish for elm tree — as he fixates on losing his virginity. When his mother, Cecilia (Andrea Suárez Paz), the family’s breadwinner, picks up a last-minute waitressing shift, she leaves him to care for his quadriplegic father, Néstor (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), thwarting his plans to party with Nina (Melanie Frometa), his seemingly unattainable crush.
Carolina Costa’s cinematography draws out the warmth and turbulence of this funny family portrait. Her sunset palette transforms the working-class home, in memorable scenes like when Olmo and Miguel (Diego Olmedo) are rehearsing their “Saturday Night Fever” dance routine or the family is frantically dragging Néstor’s urine-soaked mattress outside to dry.
The casting is pitch-perfect, capturing both the love — and the tension — in a household where Mexican immigrant parents address their children in Spanish and receive answers from their Mexican American children in English. Sometimes the dialogue feels forced — “No wonder they call me Ana the outsider,” the elder sister laments — and the opening is unnecessarily muddled. But this ensemble, with Néstor and Miguel as standouts, carries the film. Eimbcke and his fellow writer Vanesa Garnica locate the stakes in ordinary life, embracing its indignities and intimacies until the film, wonderfully anchored by clever scoring, becomes something like a song itself.
Olmo Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters.
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