‘Los Frikis’ Review: Cuban Punks Infect Themselves with HIV in a Jarringly Sweet Coming-of-Age Story from the Directors of ‘The Peanut Butter Falcon’
In the early 1990s, a couple hundred members of the Cuban punk scene deliberately infected themselves with HIV in an effort to escape the severe economic depression that crippled the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The sick were sent to state-run sanitariums, where they had free access to food, medicine, and the rock music that Fidel Castro had banned since before they were born. The “Frikis,” as the kids from that subculture were called, hoped that a cure for the virus would be developed by the time Cuba’s “Special Period” came to an end and their home city of Havana was a livable place again. Such hopes were tragically misplaced.
In the early 2020s, two American filmmakers named Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz — whose previous feature was the sweet and sincere but too-Sundance-for-Sundance “The Peanut Butter Falcon” — decided to make a sweet and sincere but too-Sundance-for-Sundance movie about this unfathomably bleak moment in Cuban history, one that celebrates its crusty young heroes for confronting “Socialism or Death” on their own terms, and finds a poignant if pyrrhic freedom in the rebellious spirit they maintained until the end. It’s a movie that renders the scarcity of post-Soviet Havana with unflinching detail, and plugs deep into the anger that fueled a generation of anarcho-punks to rage against the machine.
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But “Los Frikis” is also a movie that contrives to elide that bleakness with a sentimental and hard-to-swallow plot that backgrounds the dying Frikis in favor of a more easily dramatized character: a gawky teenager named Gustavo (Eros de la Puente) who pretends to have HIV in order to join his hardcore older brother at the country’s most idyllic sanitarium. Gustavo keeps his condition like a secret, even as he’s tortured with a poser’s guilt that makes it that much harder to watch his friends all waste away.
The film around him, however, is too busy nodding along to the prefab beats of its coming-of-age story to interrogate its own relationship to the truth — to question the merits of turning a historical suicide pact into a soft and super-fictitious riff on its protagonist’s “one perfect summer,” complete with discovering Kurt Cobain, losing his virginity to a sexy older woman, and eventually graduating from younger brother to stand-alone man.
There’s no denying that Los Frikis were punk as hell, and errant traces of that anti-establishment attitude can be found in Nilson and Schwartz’s refusal to judge their characters for injecting themselves with HIV as a “fuck you” to a government that hadn’t left them any other choice, but the declawed safety of their storytelling undercuts that energy at every turn. “Los Frikis” ultimately feels less Nirvana than Good Charlotte, and if you think that’s an anachronistic swipe to take at a movie that ends well before the dawn of “TRL,” brace yourself for “Come as You Are” to become the dominant theme of a movie set the year before that song was released. (I’m giving it a pass on thematic grounds, but let’s not pretend like millennials don’t know this stuff!)
Honestly, “Viva” actor Héctor Medina is so convincing as Gustavo’s hot-headed older brother that all but the most pedantic viewers will be inclined to let that one go (Santiago Gonzalez’s lush and lived-in cinematography adds further credibility with each shot). Skeleton-thin with a mutable blond mohawk and a “basura” tattoo scrawled across his chest, Paco radiates the charisma of a natural-born frontman even — or especially — when he’s not onstage. His band seems less compelling for their music than for the frenzy it allows. “Scum of society,” he addresses the crowd of hungry kids who’ve snuck out for the night, “make yourselves at home. And remember… better to be kings in hell than slaves in paradise!” Full of piss, vinegar, and just enough shit to smear on the propaganda slogans that have been written across the walls of Havana, Paco is like a living transmitter for all of the attitude that Castro has tried to keep out of Cuba. When the only alternative is a pirate feed of Barry Manilow, it’s no wonder why Gustavo looks up to Paco as his idol.
But Gustavo is already in the process of becoming his own man, even if Paco thinks that his little brother is too weak to make it on his own. Their late father was killed for lashing out against the government, and Gustavo doesn’t share Paco’s willingness to follow in dad’s footsteps. Not only does Gustavo not want to die for Cuba, he doesn’t want to die in Cuba — after watching Paco casually inject himself with HIV (“It’s like a little flu and then you’re fine for 10 years”), Gustavo hops a ride on the next raft to Florida, only to change his mind and abandon ship before Havana is even out of sight.
The poor kid explains his plight to a sympathetic doctor, and the next thing you know he’s reunited with his only family in the world at an edenic sanitarium on the other side of the island. There’s ice cream. There are amps. There’s even a kind-hearted and unbelievably beautiful caretaker named Maria (“Hit Man” breakout Adria Arjona), whose devotion to her patients is inspired by her own brother’s death from AIDS.
Nilson and Scwhartz are eager to savor the happy-go-lucky panacea that the sanitarium offers their characters, and “Los Frikis” is at its most self-possessed during the long and buoyant stretch in which Gustavo is acclimating to his new life as a lie. He and his shaggy-haired roommate start a terrible band called HIV+, and celebrate the joy of their creation by getting those letters tattooed on their arms (Gustavo avoids sharing a needle by insisting that he stick the ink into his own skin because it’s more badass that way).
Forgivably anachronistic as it is to hear them bumble their way through “Come as You Are,” it’s distractingly unrealistic that they get all the words right. The boys play baseball, Gustavo hangs out with his brother’s bandmates, and sometimes Maria poses as a semi-nude model for her patients to paint. At night, they even sneak out to a local bar where they can watch their favorite player step up to the plate for the Mets, an escapade that doesn’t end until Gustavo has the chance to show his brother that he’s stronger than he looks.
Life is good — good enough that the tension gradually relaxes in Paco’s thinning body, and even he begins to buy into the dream of this tomorrow-less paradise. It helps that HIV is gracious enough to make itself invisible for much of the first two acts, though we can always feel the sadness creeping over the horizon that Gustavo and his friends would rather ignore. It’s only when everyone gets too happy that the funerals start. The Kaposi’s sarcomas begin to grow larger and migrate to the characters’ faces. A miracle treatment accelerates the virus that it was intended to cure. Gustavo finds himself becoming one of the old-timers at the sanitarium, and soon recognizes that stasis is just a trick of the light in a world that runs on eternal cycles of life, death, and becoming.
It’s a credit to Nilson and Schwartz’s airy screenplay that Gustavo doesn’t have to concoct an elaborate hoax to maintain his lie (the tattoo business is an outlier), and the inevitable scene where Paco learns the truth is handled with a delicate and poignantly devastating mix of shock, anger, and profound relief. The fact is that “Los Frikis” layers enough movie-script fiction over the reality of its premise to push its luck too much further, and the film never finds much of a story to build atop that baseline reality — certainly not enough of a story to dispel the feeling that its subject would’ve been better served by a documentary.
But Nilson and Schwartz are less interested in the history of what happened than they are in celebrating the vitality that los Frikis managed to rescue from the inescapable oppression of their existence, to the point that Gustavo’s fib only seems to get in the way. There’s nothing to suggest that Gustavo is taking up a coveted spot at the sanitarium that might otherwise be reserved for someone who needs it even more than he does, and so his lie — on a clerical level, at least — is an even more effective form of rebellion than his brother’s truth.
Needless to say, the kid is not a poser. But as much as Gustavo might be eaten alive by the secret festering inside of him, and as much as de la Puente’s sensitive performance makes the character feel like more than a narrative device, his predicament has no bearing on the devil’s bargain that makes this story such a remarkable footnote in the ongoing history of anti-fascism (communist or otherwise).
“When you don’t have any more doors to open,” Paco says, “death is a door.” It’s a devastating line toward the end of a movie that listens for the nobility in that notion where so many others might have offered a feel-good bromide in response, but “Los Frikis” would have been stronger for focusing on someone who actually had to walk through that door, instead of on someone who could only stand there and hold it open. After all, the film itself is already doing that.
Grade: B-
Falling Forward Films will release “Los Frikis” in theaters in NYC and LA on Friday, December 20. It will begin to open in other major cities on December 25.
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