‘Olmo’ Review: Fernando Eimbcke’s Coming-of-Age Story Strikes a Winning Balance Between Melancholy and Gentle Farce
Sometimes, at least when you’re 14, the whole world hinges on getting to a party — and the urgency only mounts when life keeps throwing roadblocks your way. For the title character of the low-key charmer Olmo, those roadblocks shape a day of pivotal reversals and revelations, life-changing in the moment, perhaps, but especially in retrospect.
Beginning with his 2004 debut, Duck Season, a quiet fusion of goofy and transcendent, writer-director Fernando Eimbcke has brought something specific to the screen in his teen-centric features: a knack for entwining deadpan comic absurdity with the sadness lurking at the periphery of the everyday. His fourth feature unfolds with the warm glow of a memory piece but none of the gooey sentimentality.
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Olmo’s winningly forthright screenplay, by Eimbcke and Vanesa Garnica, centers on an edge-of-town neighborhood of modest manufactured homes in New Mexico, a place where the trains run nearby and the horizon is dominated by mountains. For Olmo Lopez (Aivan Uttapa), though, the main object of attention — and fantasy — is his slightly older neighbor Nina (Melanie Frometa).
Olmo’s Mexican American parents speak Spanish at home, and he and his older sister, Ana (Rosa Armendariz), answer in English. A linguistic phenomenon that might be universal, or at least widespread, among first-generation Americans, it plays out here with a natural ease. As to the kids’ responses, the more genial Olmo is not above whining, while parental demands usually provoke flat-out insolence from Ana, who breathes cigarette smoke like dragon fire.
The movie’s action kicks into gear with a borderline slapstick emergency involving a pee-soaked mattress. Complicating the humor is the reality that at the center of this fiasco lies Olmo’s bedridden father, Nestor (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), disabled by illness (multiple sclerosis, it’s revealed late in the movie). The group effort to care for him is one of the challenging facts of life, like the car on the fritz and the overdue rent, that the characters acknowledge without sinking into bleak lament. Suárez Paz nabs the tenacity and grace as well as the exhaustion in Olmo’s mother, Cecilia (Andrea Suárez Paz), as she tries to keep the household running.
Olmo’s plans to head out and hang with his best friend, Miguel (Diego Olmedo), hit a snag when Cecila is called into work for an extra waitressing shift and the ever-fuming Ana refuses to cancel her roller disco plans for the evening. Protesting that he’s “only 14,” Olmo grudgingly accepts his fate. Miguel comes over, rocking a new pair of Tony Lama boots, and they resign themselves to a night in — until the chance to be heroes to Nina presents itself.
The next-door “goddess,” as Miguel describes her, has promised to bring a stereo to a party, only to discover that her father has sold theirs. For the chance to attend said party and score quality time with Nina, Olmo volunteers the Lopez family’s stereo. Enter a MacGuffin with backstory: The stereo turns out to be as nonfunctioning as the car, prompting a lesson in transistors, transformers and cathodes from Nestor, along with misty-eyed recollections of the time he presented it to Cecilia as an anniversary gift. Sweet-faced Miguel is a far more eager student than Olmo, whose seeming indifference to mechanical matters will be refuted later, when he repairs his mother’s car and, with Miguel and Stereo as passengers, points it in the direction of the party.
Olmo and Miguel are good kids, and there’s a tender, amused fondness to the late-’70s vibe that permeates the movie. It’s in Lorus Allen’s understated production design and Cailey Breneman’s lived-in costumes, and in the selection of period tracks that punctuate the story, ranging from obscure Mexican garage rock to a megahit by Slade (the music supervisors are Joe Rodríguez and Javier Nu?o). (One notable error, and this is certainly not the first movie to make it: The call letters for the Las Cruces radio station heard in the film would start with a K, not a W.)
Composer Giosuè Greco, whose credits include another coming-of-age feature, last year’s Dìdi, contributes an eloquent score of plaintive chords as well as pluckier passages, a fine and unfussy complement to the action. That action includes the across-town back-and-forth of the stereo, a compact piece of equipment that’s soaked in one generation’s memories while serving as a prop for Olmo and Miguel’s Saturday Night Fever-inspired dance moves.
Like nearly everything about these two, their Tony Manero fascination has a boyish innocence. The two performers effortlessly convey their characters’ callow charm, and there’s a disarming lack of to-do in the way Uttapa, at the center of the story, rides its tonal shifts as Olmo faces moments of awakening, both sublime and potentially shattering.
Another standout in the strong cast is Sánchez Parra. Nestor is a man trying to maintain his dignity while at the mercy of everyone around him, his frustrations rising to the surface at the slightest provocation from his back-talking kids or his younger brother (Valentin Mexico), a hotshot with a Trans Am.
Fully in sync with the director’s sensibility, Carolina Costa’s deft camerawork embraces these characters, this place, and the endless dance between light and dark: the washed turquoise of a morning sky, the empty streets and half-lit rooms, the boozy shadows of a wrong stop on Olmo and Miguel’s nighttime odyssey. For a few long minutes, the boys find themselves not in a houseful of teenagers, but at a stranger’s wake. After a rush of emotions to the surface, they skedaddle, in as modest a clean escape as the movies have ever seen — unscathed but, like true heroes, not unchanged.
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