Two women, Carmen (Ontiveros) and Anna (Ferrara), are locked in an age-old struggle. It’s the struggle between mothers and daughters, expectations and possibilities, cultural constraints and individual potential — the struggle of a first-generation Mexican-American Latina in East Los Angeles to break from tradition and forge a personal identity that is a natural outgrowth of her own needs and desires. It’s a coming-of-age story we’ve all seen bits of in other films — but it’s rarely been told with such affecting grace and cultural specificity. Real Women Have Curves is a movie whose decency and honesty gets under your skin. Technically, the movie has a few ragged edges and some of the supporting performances lack that professional “something,” but there is no getting around the electricity sparked by newcomer Ferrara and the always outstanding Ontiveros (As Good as It Gets, Chuck & Buck, Storytelling). Ferrara is the non-svelte high school graduate, Ana, who is smart enough to have gotten herself placed into the Beverly Hills high school and Carmen is the mother who frets over finding a husband for her plus-sized daughter and integrating Ana into the sewing shop managed by her other daughter Estela (Oliu). Here Carmen will be able to teach Ana the only skill she knows — sewing — and keep her at home so that she can replace the aging Ana in the family structure. When Ana wails that she’s only 18 and wants to do other things with her life, Carmen angrily retorts that Ana has had life easy: Carmen has been working since the age of 13. Carmen is understandably tired and wants to see that her progeny are taken care of. She’s hardly a villain, but her attitude and beliefs make her seem adversarial. As Ana is encouraged by her high school teacher (Lopez) to apply to colleges, her family worries about the implications. Ana also has to deal with issues of body image — not only from the society at large but from her mother’s own mouth. The curves referred to in the title have more significance than mere body language: It also refers to the curves life throws at us — women and men. This winning movie received not only the Audience Award at Sundance, but also a Special Jury Award for Acting for leads Ferrara and Ontiveros — further evidence that even though the storyline of Real Women Have Curves is a somewhat familiar tale, the film’s originality lies in the way in which it’s told.
This article appears in Stan Knee.
