Hanging With The Home Girls -- `Mi Vida Loca' A Vibrant Look At Latina Gang Life

Movie review

XXX "Mi Vida Loca" (My Crazy Life), with Seidy Lopez, Jesse Borrego, Angel Aviles, Jacob Vargas. Written and directed by Allison Anders. Varsity. "R" - Restricted because of violence, sex scenes. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Two years ago, Allison Anders won the New York Film Critics' prize for best new director for her shoestring-budget film about mother-daughter relationships, "Gas Food Lodging."

The picture wasn't a big hit, even in art houses, but it has enjoyed an unusually long life on pay-cable stations, where it still turns up every month or so at odd hours. Home Box Office was impressed enough to co-finance her next picture, "Mi Vida Loca," and make it HBO Showcase's first theatrical release.

The result is a film that is technically more impressive than "Gas Food Lodging" (the gorgeous cinematography is by Rodrigo Garcia, who shot the stylish Mexican film, "Danzon" ) and takes more chances with subject matter, story structure and narrative style. It's a more ambitious and colorful movie, though it's not quite as satisfying.

When Anders began writing "Mi Vida Loca," she had in mind three separate stories about Mexican-American girl gangs living in Echo Park. Eventually she blended them into a single-narrative ensemble piece, although the seams occasionally show.

It takes a while to sort out the characters and get to know them. At first Anders seems so concerned about setting up situations that she doesn't spend enough time with her actors, establishing distinguishing traits and relationships.

The movie eventually reveals itself as a darkly ironic romantic triangle involving two women, best friends since childhood, whose friendship nearly ends when both are impregnated by the same charmingly duplicitous drug dealer.

Angel Aviles makes the strongest impression as the tomboyish Sad Girl. Seidy Lopez is her alienated pal, Mousie, and Jacob Vargas, who had a key role in "Gas Food Lodging," is the dealer, Ernesto, who has children by both women. Marlo Marron plays a teenager who goes to jail for her boyfriend's crimes, and Bertilla Damas is a woman who tries to dissociate herself from gang life.

All the central characters are played by professionals, but the supporting cast includes a few Echo Park girls who haven't acted before. While their inexperience is sometimes a drawback, they also contribute a vitality to the picture that makes certain scenes play like a documentary about barrio life.

Like "Boyz N the Hood," the movie is more about people than gang violence. It doesn't avoid the shootings, and it certainly doesn't steer clear of their devastating consequences. But it concentrates on what happens between and after the killings, as its women survivors try to move on with their lives.

The script sometimes communicates a soapbox quality, as when one of the girls declares that "Women don't use weapons to prove a point, women use weapons for love." But there's a touch of irony even in these passages. The movie is finally less an endorsement of romanticized feminism than it is a story about the power of friendship.