Mi Vida Loca: Allison Anders’ Tale of Latinas Gangs, Follow-Up to Gas Food Lodging

For Mi Vida Loca (“My Crazy Life”), director Allison Anders turned to Latinas gangs in Los Angeles, an unexplored theme in American cinema, manstream or indie.

Grade: C+ (** out of *****)

Mi Vida Loca
Theatrical release poster

Like Gas Food Lodging, her impressive solo feature debut, the movie concerns the plight of teenage girls who become welfare mothers, stuck with no future outside the barrio. Demonstrating her commitment to working-class women, Anders focuses on Echo Park Latinas, providing a fresh respite from the male-themed movies that have dominated the gang genre. Films about street gangs have been replete with cliches and stereotypes, even the gritty ones dwell on macho, volatile men who stake out their territories in graffiti and blood, and women who are mostly sex objects.

Giving the cholas their say, Mi Vida Loca is about female adolescents who seek solace in outlaw life in defiance of their poverty. The nonlinear narrative is divided into three interrelated chapters, which depict the barrio without sensationalism or condescension. The melodrama, which consists of long flashbacks, interweaves a romantic interlude about a woman who falls in love with her prison pen pal. The first tale is about the animosity between best friends Mousie (Seidy Lopez) and Sad Girl (Angel Aviles) over their mutual boyfriend.

The second, lighter story concerns the release of Giggles (Marlo Marron) from jail and her return to Echo Park. A more ironic tone resurfaces with the closing segment, which involves the disillusionment of Blue Eyes (Magali Alvarado) with the playboy she worships.

The mix of an unknown professionals with actual homegirls pays off: It’s almost impossible to distinguish the actors from the residents. Throughout, there’s keen attention to textures, with a sumptuous camera recording background details. In all of her films, Anders has employed a heightened sense of color. Here, Blue Eyes wears a red dress that matches the bridge, and a closeup of Sad Girl’s mouth reveals erotic lips that are as purple as petals.

Anders’s intent was to show that the women don’t need men. But, in fact, they do–and desperately so.

Sad Girl and Mousie have been best friends since childhood, but their friendship is strained when each becomes pregnant by Ernesto (Jacob Vargas), a sweet-tempered drug dealer who cares more for his painted truck than for either femme.

Tough around the edges, but soft at the center, the film comes from Anders’ heart rather than her head. One girl says, “Women don’t use weapons to prove a point, they use weapons for love,” but before the movie is over, a rival proves her wrong. The women exist in a world where struggle are expressed in absolute terms of love or hate.

In its blend of ethnography and flawed storytelling, the narrative wavers, perhaps a result of Anders’ uncertainty over whether she was making a melodrama or a documentary.

The episodic structure accentuates the film’s problematic shifts in tone from romanticism to realism. And the use of multiple voice-overs is confusing, especially in the beginning, when the two main characters–Mousie and Sad Girl–narrate their stories. The logic of the narrative is flawed, as Holly Willis pointed out, because the film doesn’t convince us that the girls are irrevocably entrapped by their milieu.

Even so, Mi Vida Loca received a lot of publicity as the first movie about Latinas. But whereas her background as an unwed mother proved an asset for Gas Food Lodging, Anders shows no understanding of her characters–an Latino filmmaker might have been more sensitive to the material. Though Anders talked to the bario girls at length, her script lacks the intimacy and immediacy of Gas Food Lodging, made as it is from the outside.

To her credit, Anders doesn’t patronize the Latino community with another stereotypical portrait. “The last thing I wanted,” Anders declared in a manifesto, “and certainly the last thing these kids needed was to be colonized by a white liberal, preaching a point of view that hands out easy solutions.”

Anders was inspired to write Mi Vida Loca after moving to Echo Park in 1986 and becoming acquainted with the local gang, Echo Park Locas. Anders said: “My goal was to get inside their heads and understand, just as I would any subculture. But because of the criminal element and police harassment, I felt extra responsibility to discover and convey their hopes and dreams, no matter what they were, and not through society’s expectations. I felt like if after seeing Mi Vida Loca if one person who connected to Whisper or Baby Doll or Ernesto any of the characters saw a chola on the street, maybe they’d not just dismiss them, they’d know a beating heart with dreams all their own.”[2]

The film is dedicated to the memory of Nica Rogers, a member of the Echo Park Locas who appears briefly in the film and died after the shoot concluded. After the release, Anders and Film Independent established a scholarship program to help assist the kids of Echo Park with higher education.

The soundtrack, which contains hip hop and contemporary R&B, helps up to a poimt making the flawed narrative more vivid and tolerable thanit deserved.

Nonetheless, judging by what unfolds on screen, Anderson’s treatment lacks a discernible point of view, which may stem from the uneasy mixture of honorable sociology with a filmmaking that technically leaves much to be desired.

Cast
Angel Aviles as Mona “Sad Girl”
Seidy López as Marivel “Mousie”
Jacob Vargas as Ernesto “Bullet”
Nelida Lopez as “Whisper”
Marlo Marron as Angelica “Giggles”
Christina Solis as “Baby Doll”
Arthur Esquer as “Shadow”
Julian Reyes as “Big Sleepy”
Gabriel Gonzales as “Sleepy”
Magali Alvarado as Alicia “La Blue Eyes”
Jesse Borrego as Juan “El Duran” Temido
Bertila Damas as Rachel
Monica Lutton as Chucky
Devine as “Devine”
Veronica Arrellano as “Stranger”
Panchito Gómez as “Joker Bird”
Noah Verduzco as “Chuco”
Angelo Martinez as “Rascal”
Danny Trejo as Frank “Casual Dreamer”
Eddie Perez as “Sir Speedy”
Desire Galvez as “Dimples”
Salma Hayek as “Gata”
Los Lobos as Party Band
Jason Lee as Teenage Drug Customer
Spike Jonze as Teenage Drug Customer