Within the early Nineties, a pair hundred members of the Cuban punk scene intentionally contaminated themselves with HIV in an effort to flee the extreme financial despair that crippled the nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The sick have been despatched to state-run sanitariums, the place they’d free entry to meals, drugs, and the rock music that Fidel Castro had banned since earlier than they have been born. The “Frikis,” as the children from that subculture have been known as, hoped {that a} remedy for the virus can be developed by the point Cuba’s “Particular Interval” got here to an finish and their house metropolis of Havana was a livable place once more. Such hopes have been tragically misplaced.
Within the early 2020s, two American filmmakers named Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz — whose earlier function was the candy and honest however too-Sundance-for-Sundance “The Peanut Butter Falcon” — determined to make a candy and honest however too-Sundance-for-Sundance film about this unfathomably bleak second in Cuban historical past, one which celebrates its crusty younger heroes for confronting “Socialism or Dying” on their very own phrases, and finds a poignant if pyrrhic freedom within the rebellious spirit they maintained till the top. It’s a film that renders the shortage of post-Soviet Havana with unflinching element, and plugs deep into the anger that fueled a technology of anarcho-punks to rage in opposition to the machine.
However “Los Frikis” can be a film that contrives to elide that bleakness with a sentimental and hard-to-swallow plot that backgrounds the dying Frikis in favor of a extra simply dramatized character: a gawky teenager named Gustavo (Eros de la Puente) who pretends to have HIV with a view to be a part of his hardcore older brother on the nation’s most idyllic sanitarium. Gustavo retains his situation like a secret, whilst he’s tortured with a poser’s guilt that makes it that a lot tougher to observe his buddies all waste away.
The movie round him, nonetheless, is simply too busy nodding alongside to the prefab beats of its coming-of-age story to interrogate its personal relationship to the reality — to query the deserves of turning a historic suicide pact right into a gentle and super-fictitious riff on its protagonist’s “one good summer season,” full with discovering Kurt Cobain, dropping his virginity to a horny older girl, and finally graduating from youthful brother to stand-alone man.
There’s no denying that Los Frikis have been punk as hell, and errant traces of that anti-establishment angle may be present in Nilson and Schwartz’s refusal to guage their characters for injecting themselves with HIV as a “fuck you” to a authorities that hadn’t left them every other alternative, however the declawed security of their storytelling undercuts that power at each flip. “Los Frikis” finally feels much less Nirvana than Good Charlotte, and should you assume that’s an anachronistic swipe to take at a film that ends properly earlier than the daybreak of “TRL,” brace your self for “Come as You Are” to develop into the dominant theme of a film set the 12 months earlier than that track was launched. (I’m giving it a go on thematic grounds, however let’s not fake like millennials don’t know these things!)
Truthfully, “Viva” actor Héctor Medina is so convincing as Gustavo’s hot-headed older brother that each one however probably the most pedantic viewers have a tendency to let that one go (Santiago Gonzalez’s lush and lived-in cinematography provides additional credibility with every shot). Skeleton-thin with a mutable blond mohawk and a “basura” tattoo scrawled throughout his chest, Paco radiates the charisma of a natural-born frontman even — or particularly — when he’s not onstage. His band appears much less compelling for his or her music than for the frenzy it permits. “Scum of society,” he addresses the gang of hungry youngsters who’ve snuck out for the evening, “make yourselves at house. And bear in mind… higher to be kings in hell than slaves in paradise!” Stuffed with piss, vinegar, and simply sufficient shit to smear on the propaganda slogans which have been written throughout the partitions of Havana, Paco is sort of a dwelling transmitter for all the angle that Castro has tried to maintain out of Cuba. When the one various is a pirate feed of Barry Manilow, it’s no marvel why Gustavo seems to be as much as Paco as his idol.
However Gustavo is already within the strategy of turning into his personal man, even when Paco thinks that his little brother is simply too weak to make it on his personal. Their late father was killed for lashing out in opposition to the federal government, and Gustavo doesn’t share Paco’s willingness to observe in dad’s footsteps. Not solely does Gustavo not wish to die for Cuba, he doesn’t wish to die in Cuba — after watching Paco casually inject himself with HIV (“It’s like a little bit flu and then you definitely’re positive for 10 years”), Gustavo hops a experience on the subsequent raft to Florida, solely to vary his thoughts and abandon ship earlier than Havana is even out of sight.
The poor child explains his plight to a sympathetic physician, and the subsequent factor you realize he’s reunited together with his solely household on the planet at an edenic sanitarium on the opposite facet of the island. There’s ice cream. There are amps. There’s even a kind-hearted and unbelievably stunning caretaker named Maria (“Hit Man” breakout Adria Arjona), whose devotion to her sufferers is impressed by her personal brother’s loss of life from AIDS.
Nilson and Scwhartz are wanting to savor the happy-go-lucky panacea that the sanitarium affords their characters, and “Los Frikis” is at its most self-possessed through the lengthy and buoyant stretch through which Gustavo is acclimating to his new life as a lie. He and his shaggy-haired roommate begin a horrible band known as HIV+, and have a good time the enjoyment of their creation by getting these letters tattooed on their arms (Gustavo avoids sharing a needle by insisting that he stick the ink into his personal pores and skin as a result of it’s extra badass that manner).
Forgivably anachronistic as it’s to listen to them bumble their manner via “Come as You Are,” it’s distractingly unrealistic that they get all of the phrases proper. The boys play baseball, Gustavo hangs out together with his brother’s bandmates, and generally Maria poses as a semi-nude mannequin for her sufferers to color. At evening, they even sneak out to an area bar the place they will watch their favourite participant step as much as the plate for the Mets, an escapade that doesn’t finish till Gustavo has the prospect to point out his brother that he’s stronger than he seems to be.
Life is sweet — adequate that the strain regularly relaxes in Paco’s thinning physique, and even he begins to purchase into the dream of this tomorrow-less paradise. It helps that HIV is gracious sufficient to make itself invisible for a lot of the primary two acts, although we will at all times really feel the unhappiness creeping over the horizon that Gustavo and his buddies would slightly ignore. It’s solely when everybody will get too completely satisfied that the funerals begin. The Kaposi’s sarcomas start to develop bigger and migrate to the characters’ faces. A miracle therapy accelerates the virus that it was supposed to remedy. Gustavo finds himself turning into one of many old-timers on the sanitarium, and shortly acknowledges that stasis is only a trick of the sunshine in a world that runs on everlasting cycles of life, loss of life, and turning into.
It’s a credit score to Nilson and Schwartz’s ethereal screenplay that Gustavo doesn’t need to concoct an elaborate hoax to take care of his lie (the tattoo enterprise is an outlier), and the inevitable scene the place Paco learns the reality is dealt with with a fragile and poignantly devastating mixture of shock, anger, and profound reduction. The actual fact is that “Los Frikis” layers sufficient movie-script fiction over the truth of its premise to push its luck an excessive amount of additional, and the movie by no means finds a lot of a narrative to construct atop that baseline actuality — definitely not sufficient of a narrative to dispel the sensation that its topic would’ve been higher served by a documentary.
However Nilson and Schwartz are much less within the historical past of what occurred than they’re in celebrating the vitality that los Frikis managed to rescue from the inescapable oppression of their existence, to the purpose that Gustavo’s fib solely appears to get in the way in which. There’s nothing to recommend that Gustavo is taking over a coveted spot on the sanitarium which may in any other case be reserved for somebody who wants it much more than he does, and so his lie — on a clerical stage, not less than — is an much more efficient type of insurrection than his brother’s fact.
Evidently, the child just isn’t a poser. However as a lot as Gustavo could be eaten alive by the key festering within him, and as a lot as de la Puente’s delicate efficiency makes the character really feel like greater than a story gadget, his predicament has no bearing on the satan’s discount that makes this story such a exceptional footnote within the ongoing historical past of anti-fascism (communist or in any other case).
“Whenever you don’t have any extra doorways to open,” Paco says, “loss of life is a door.” It’s a devastating line towards the top of a film that listens for the the Aristocracy in that notion the place so many others may need supplied a feel-good bromide in response, however “Los Frikis” would have been stronger for specializing in somebody who really needed to stroll via that door, as an alternative of on somebody who may solely stand there and maintain it open. In any case, the movie itself is already doing that.
Grade: B-
Falling Ahead Movies will launch “Los Frikis” in theaters in NYC and LA on Friday, December 20. It is going to start to open in different main cities on December 25.