Mi Vida Loca (Channel Four Films, Cinéville, HBO, 1993)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film, which we watched off YouTube, was Mi Vida Loca (“My Crazy Life”), made in 1993 about the Latino/a community of Echo Park in Los Angeles and written and directed by someone with the decidedly non-Latina name of Allison Anders. (Her last name means “different” or “other than” in German.) My husband Charles saw it when it was at least relatively new and wanted to see it again, so he searched YouTube and a surprising number of hits came up (though some of them were inevitably for music videos of the Ricky Martin song “Livin’ La Vida Loca”). Charles and I had put this one on the back burner until last night, and I decided to go ahead and watch it just before the new episode of The Endgame. When it ended Charles asked me what I’d thought of it, and I said, “It’s the sort of film I respect more than I actually like” – though I’m thinking about it now and I’m liking it a lot more than I did when we were watching it.

It’s a deliberately episodic movie revolving around the lives of two barrio teenage women who have grown up together, “Mousie” (Seidy Lopez) and “Sad Girl” (Angel Aviles). They were best friends throughout their childhoods and early teen years until about a year before the start if the film, when they came to a parting of the ways over Ernesto (Jacob Vargas). First Ernesto started an affair with Mousie and ended up getting her pregnant; then he had sex with Sad Girl and got her pregnant, too. (This reminded me of the Lifetime movie Double Daddy, about a hyper-potent teenage male who impregnated two women on the same night.) Then, at least in part to raise money for his kids, Ernesto goes into drug dealing and gets himself killed. The rest of the movie deals with how Mousie and Sad Girl are going to raise their kids with their father dead (one thing they do is go on welfare, three years before Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress teamed up to “end welfare as we know it”) and what’s going to happen to “Suavecito,” Ernesto’s elaborately customized pickup truck whose bed not only has a closed cover with an elaborate painting of a woman and “Suavecito” on it in big letters, it’s also been equipped with risers so it can lift up and almost literally dance.

There’s also the question of who’s going to take over Ernesto’s drug business and in particular how they’re going to deal with the white customers who are always coming up too short on the cash and are asking for freebies. One of the claimants for the drug business is Sleepy (Gabriel Gonzalez), who got a lot of screen time shirtless and I was falling in lust with him and especially those gorgeous pecs. There’s also El Duran (Jesse Borrego), who even though he doesn’t really want “Suavecito” feels he has an obligation to it since Ernesto allegedly promised it to him before he croaked. At times Mi Vida Loca comes off like a knockoff of West Side Story, albeit with an all-Latino cast – the final confrontation occurs at a dance at a school gym in the territory of Willow Park, another Latino neighborhood whose gangs are in near-mortal conflict with those of Echo Park. At other times it seems like what The Outsiders and Rumble Fish author Sue Hinton would have written if she’d been Latina.

Charles told me that when the film was new it was the subject of a lot of controversy over the allegedly poor acting of the film’s cast – though that didn’t bother me at all: whatever their level of acting skills or talents might have been in other parts, I had no trouble believing in these people as the characters they were supposed to be playing. In fact, what I liked best about Mi Vida Loca was its understatement: though it’s about people whose lives are frequently cut short for mundane and incomprehensible reasons, it’s also told in a matter-of-fact fashion that undercuts the potential sentimentality of the story and instead makes us believe that these are people whose lives are set up this way because things just happen to them. It’s also a feminist empowerment movie because at the end the women in the cast are banding together and announcing that from then on they’re going to take care and look out for themselves instead of relying on men to look after them.

At one level it’s nice to hear them say that, particularly since the two central characters both have sex with the same guy and then had his kids (they even talk to their baby children while they’re both walking their strollers together and warning the kids out to get too close to each other physically because they’re half-brother ahd half-sister – at an age at which neither child could understand any of this), they realize that the women of their generation and their neighborhood will have to come together and protest each other instead of relying on men. It becomes more serious when, after yet another shooting at the gym fight during the final confrontation (at which the members of Los Lobos appear as the bored musicians who project an air of, “”We’ve seen this all before; now, let’s just keep our heads down and do what we need to do to survive the night”), the women realize they have to rely on themselves and each other. There are a few people in this film who either had been “names” (like Carlos Rivas, the gorgeous hunk who was Rita Moreno’s love interest and duet partner in The King and I 37 years earlier and now gets cast as Mousie’s couch-potato dad) or would become “names” (like Selma Hayek, who plays the small part of “Gata”), but aside from that Mi Vida Loca is a haunting film on its own merits even though one could readily understand Latinos asking, “Why another film about drug dealers and gangbangers, especially five years after Stand and Deliver?”