Chono (Jon Seda) is a macho husband from hell. When he finds out that his wife Lisette (Lauren Velez) wanst to get a job in order to pay for a new sterio, he is outraged. So when their Puerto Rican neighbourhood in the South Bronx is hit by a blackout one stifling summer night, he tries to procure the hi-fi himself by going on a looting spree, but gets caught and ends up in jail. Meanwhile his wife is left to bring up their three children alone, and aided by her transsexual brother Alexis, who lends her false breasts, she heads uptown to try to make it as a model. A series of chance encounters gets her a job in a record company working for Stephen Price (Griffin Dunne), who falls in lust with her and drives her home in his red lamborghini, much to the displeasure of Chino’s mother (Rita Moreno).
Director darnell Martin’s brash fast-paced debut is an impressive one. She emerges as an unusually perceptive chronicler of fragile sexual relationships and complex family ties, and elicits stong perfornaces from an inspired cst. The film rises above the usual ghetto bonund cliches because the heroine skips out of the neighbourhood and into the real world to pursue her ambitions. Although if suffers from occasional bouts of over-exuberance, and the plot sometimes goes offf the boil, this is a wildly original, hard-edged romantic comedy that should put Martin’s name firmly on the map.