Growing up peacefully in NYC

Peter Sollett's remarkable movie about the lives and loves of Latino teenagers in New York's Lower East Side is an unexpected treat. Unexpected, because it does not feature the drugs and firearms traditionally associated with the milieu and the characters.

Victor (Victor Rasuk) lives with his younger brother, Nino (Silvestre Rasuk), and his overweight sister, Vicki (Krystal Rodriguez), in a cluttered apartment ruled by the sole remaining adult in their lives, the redoubtable Grandma (Altagracia Guzman). In common with most of his "homies", Victor fancies himself as a ladies' man, a mucho macho man who only has to lick his lips for girls to fall at his feet. The reality, however, is somewhat different: Victor is a virgin whose hollow posturing conceals a decent heart and who, in spite of the bravado, is willing to be tutored in the ways of women.

Luckily, "Juicy" Judy Ramirez (Judy Marte), the neighbourhood beauty, is on hand (along with the fearsome Grandma) and their tentative romance flowers in the course of a long, hot New York summer. Developed from an award-winning short film made with the same cast, Sollett's movie captures the benign spirit of the Latin community in the same way that Robert Guediguian explores the fundamental goodness of his Marseille underclass in movies such as Marius et Jeannette and A la Place du Coeur.

The crucial sense of family, in the face of antipathetic odds of poverty, missing parents and general lack of privilege, is kept alive by Grandma's authoritarian if arcane moral value system.

Much of the improvisational dialogue has been refined and the non-professional cast all acquit themselves well. Judy's impersonation of Victor to her less attractive best friend, Melonie (Melonie Diaz) is hysterically accurate and the casual cruelty of her line, "You're the lucky one. You don't have to walk down the street and be hassled", rings with authenticity.

Even in the margins, the film evokes an ethnic neighbourhood that is already disappearing: the chickens kept in the middle of an urban jungle, the electric candles in the Spanish church, the hot and sexy atmosphere of an inner-city heat wave.

Even the occasional cliche is given a fresh coat of paint. When Melonie's would-be boyfriend asks her to take off her glasses and unpin her hair, he gasps: "You look like Julia Roberts." And in her smile of disbelief and pleasure at the remark there is a wonderful moment: for a second she looks exactly like Julia Roberts.

Raising Victor Vargas
Cert: 15