STAR MAPS

For generations, film buffs have been fascinated with the impossible task of breaking into Hollywood. For years, actors, writers, directors, and others have thrown themselves at the industry, forsaking their dignity or their self-esteem in favor of the elusive movie role, screenplay sale or directing job. Some have described Hollywood as a fortress castle, which only lets down its drawbridge for a few precious moments in many a wannabe’s life and quickly draws it up before he or she can cross the moat. Down through the generations, many stars have compromised their integrity by trading their bodies for sex with a mogul, or studio chieftain. Just as many, or more, have crossed the impossible barrier by legitimate hard work, lucky breaks and/or prayer. Whereas breaking into fortress Hollywood is a fascinating subject to millions of people, crossing the impossible barrier by sex is probably less common than crossing it in other ways.

The ostensible subject of STAR MAPS is breaking into fortress Hollywood. However, in his sensitive direction of his first feature-length movie, Miguel Arteta chose to focus on the tawdry, sordid underside of the industry, where wannabes trade their bodies for a role. It is a squalid subject, and in the graphic way Arteta directed STAR MAPS, it is inappropriate for moral Americans.

In STAR MAPS, 18-year-old Mexican immigrant Carlos (Douglas Spain) stands on Los Angeles street corners peddling maps to the homes of Hollywood stars. What he really sells is his own body, to male and to female customers who first pay his brutish pimp father, Pepe (Efrain Figueroa). One by one, sex customers drive up, informing the young man that “Pepe sent me,” and Carlos beds them. When a beautiful woman, Jenny (Kandeyce Jorden), drives up in an expensive car, Carlos thinks that he has scored his first major break into the film industry. Jenny is an actress on a TV soap opera and agrees to give Carlos a part on her TV show as a Mexican gardener.

The problem is that his brutish father, Pepe, is jealous of his son’s potential earning power as a male prostitute and threatens to fire him if he takes the Hollywood role or continues to see Jenny. Carlos, however, defies his father, pursues the acting role and Jenny. Unaccountably, Jenny feels no remorse whatsoever in copulating with her protégé right on the set, under the eyes of her husband, who is the TV program’s producer. This producer later informs his wife by phone that he wants a divorce.

Meanwhile, back at the dysfunctional hacienda, Pepe barges in on Carlos’ sweet sister’s dinner for her accountant boyfriend, who stands up to the wicked father when he accuses his daughter of prostituting herself. Pepe causes havoc when he throws out the good boyfriend and verbally attacks his daughter. Since Pepe gives Carlos ample ammunition, the dramatic question of the movie centers around whether Carlos will break away permanently from his wicked father or not. In a family carrying such disastrous spiritual weight, Carlos’ mother’s suicide by pills occurs almost as incidental to the rest of the tragic story.

STAR MAPS is indeed a tragedy. A tragedy without redemption, and giving little pleasure to audiences who crave resolution of the searing emotional traumas they witness onscreen as this film plays out. STAR MAPS is not a film for moral Americans, least of all for Latino Americans, whose reputation for quiet and steady hard work it unnecessarily besmirches by the unmotivated criminality on the part of the brutish father, Pepe, who abuses everyone he encounters.