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Tiny tattooed tears trickle from tomboy Sad Girl's eye, and Mousie's scarlet lipstick and skintight dresses make her look much older than the high school student she'd be, if she were in school. Mi Vida Loca opens with the image of Sad Girl (Angel Aviles) sitting against a bare wall, explaining in voiceover how she and her best friend Mousie (Seidy Lopez) ceased to be the girls they were before they joined a gang: Mona and Mirabel. When they joined up, she explains, there were only two colorful nicknames left. "Mousie" naturally went to tiny Maribel, and although everyone argued that Mona was too happy to be called Sad Girl, that's no longer true, she says matter-of-factly.
The angle is neutral, the shot stark and conspicuously uncomposed, the narration delivered in flat, clumsy tones; AvilEs gazes into the lens and shifts uncomfortably in place. The scene is discomfiting, posing a series of questions with no obvious answers. Is AvilEs an unknown actress or one of the real homegirls with whom writer-director Allison Anders fleshed out the cast? Is her lack of polish inexperience, or a finely calibrated performance designed to simulate the awkwardness of nonprofessionals? Are the reminiscences hers or are they secondhand experience, adulterated and sifted through the filter of fiction? And in any event, what are we to think of her in her black lipstick and her baggy jeans, fingers disfigured by the blue, gothic letters that spell out her name? Mi Vida Loca scrupulously avoids the visual cues that would guide viewers to easy assessments of its characters, and though AvilEs and Lopez are in fact both actresses, 16-year-old Nelida Lopez, who plays their friend Whisper, isn't. She's the first gang girl Anders befriended, her guide into the world Mi Vida Loca explores.
Anders, whose independent low-budget Gas Food Lodging ('92) made truck-stop women something more than the butt of a sexist joke, first saw the real-life Sad Girls and Mousies hanging around her Los Angeles neighborhood, the evocatively named Echo Park. A locale filled with Chandleresque bungalows surrounding a small, serene lake, it was once the hideaway of silent movie stars, later immortalized in Chinatown, and now it's a shabby, fashionable neighborhood where bohemia and barrio meet. To Anders, these teenage...