FILM: José

During this time of closed movie theaters, some art houses like Laemmle and festivals like Outfest are brokering deals with distibutors for streaming releases, where the films that we might have been watching on the big screen now can be streamed for a rental fee, which helps support them. Thus, through Outfest, we came across the film José. Whether you enjoyed the film Roma would be a good barometer of whether you might enjoy José. If you crave plot, character, and conflict in a film, then this is not for you. On the other hand, if you can be engaged with a slice of life in a foreign setting, then you may enjoy it. José, the title character, is a young man, the youngest of his siblings and the last one living with his mother in Guatemala City. They scrape by, she by hocking sandwiches at makeshift street stalls when she doesn’t get chased away by the police, and he by standing in the street and trying to steer traffic toward a café. José is gay, and he also sneaks off for hook-ups he finds on Grindr (or whatever the Guatemalan equivalent mobile phone app is). At one point he meets Luis, a construction worker from a smaller village, and the possibility of real romance begins to present itself, at least until Luis’s city job ends and he wants José to come back with him to his home village. While we can infer the underlying emotional conflict, little of it is articulated in the sparse dialog. But from the fly-on-the-wall glimpses of their lives, we can see how hard life is, how much his mother cares for and is dependent on him, and the constrained options open to him. Alas, like a typical young man, he expresses almost nothing of what weighs on his mind. We see the outside, a rich verismo depiction of this life, but are left to imagine the inside.