Amid the ocean of movies featuring young women as principal players, roughly all the actors chosen are usually of a very specific physical type. Unfortunately, that type is not, statistically, an average young woman. In this feature from Patricia Cardoso, although body size is hardly a non-issue, dieting is not what Ana (America Ferrera) struggles with. At her core, she knows from the start that she is OK. It is the ridicule from her mother and her loyalty to her family in opposition to her dreams that she must cope with.
Based on the play of the same title by Josephina Lopez, the film was a big audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival and honored for outstanding performances by Ferrera and Lupe Ontiveros. Ana is about to graduate from high school. Not the high school in her working class Los Angeles neighborhood, but two or three bus rides across town to Beverly Hills High where she has managed to get herself enrolled, no small task. In short, she is a bright, resourceful and pretty young woman. She lives with her parents, sister, and grandfather. Her father works as a landscaper on the extravagant estates of LA. Mother works in daughter Estela's dress factory. On the last day of school, as her classmates talk of their college plans, she unenthusiastically accepts finding a job to help her family.
The catalyst for Ana's shift into adulthood following her own path is ironically, if predictably, her mother. Entering middle age kicking and screaming, mama Carmen (Ontiveros, recently seen in Chuck and Buck) is desperately hanging on to her own youth and resents the idea that her daughter will have chances she did not. She alternately berates Ana for being fat and lazy (she is neither), or relies on in her and treats as her most trusted confidant.
Aided by her sympathetic father and grandfather and a persistent teacher who does not want to see Ana's potential wasted in a dead end job, Ana emerges as her own woman. During the summer after high school, with humor and a frolicsome segue into the garment district factory run by Ana's sister, the real women emerge, cellulite and all. Estela makes fancy cocktail dresses for a few dollars profit that sell at Bloomingdale's for $600.00. Unable to make payroll or the rent, she goes with Ana to the office of her well-heeled distributor to ask for an advance. The disdain with which they are dismissed helps push Ana a little further out of her chrysalis. Although some contrived dialog ("Right-on!" says sister Estela) and an unlikely boyfriend dot Ana's summer, the film is refreshing and insightful. With a little help from her friends, she gets by¾nothing wrong with that.
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