How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

Drama

Written and directed by Georgina Riedel

I’ll gladly watch any movie staring Elizabeth Peña. Even when she plays a character whose motivations seem more inspired by plot necessities than human emotions, she manages to convey all the depth, warmth, and confusion of real human life. And she’s hot.

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer concerns itself with three women at different times in life, all single, all related, and all dealing with sexual longing and desire. There’s the 70-year-old widow Doña (Lucy Gallardo), her divorced daughter Lolita (Peña), and Lolita’s 17-year-old daughter, Blanca (America Ferrera). Riedel sets her story in a quiet Arizona small town with an overwhelmingly Chicano population. Aside from a few references to the Catholic Church, the characters’ ethnicity has little to do with the film.

Of the three intertwined stories, Doña’s is the best. She buys a car despite her advanced age and complete lack of driving experience. Her aging gardener offers to help. They feel a clear, mutual attraction, but they hold back, feeling hampered by social conventions as well as insecurities about their no-longer-young bodies. They’re a town scandal before they touch each other.

Meanwhile, her virginal granddaughter Blanca cruises in a pickup truck driven by a good-looking new boy in town (cars and sex go together in this film’s world view). She’s not sure how far she wants to take this relationship. Not a bad story, but there’s little here about adolescent curiosity and lust that you haven’t seen in other films (and possibly in your life).

With a mother and daughter like these two, why would Lolita look for a romance of her own (interesting choice for a name, though)? She doesn’t look for one, but it finds her in the weakest of the three stories. Running a butcher shop with a dumpy-looking guy who clearly adores her, she has to fend off the advances of a ruggedly handsome but married jerk. As written, Lolita shows little internal consistency. In one scene she wears a very sexy dress to breakfast with her puritanical mother, as if picking for a fight; in another she admonishes that same mother for spending time with a man and thus making people talk. Peña does wonders with the role, but she can’t overcome its weaknesses.

Riedel mostly succeeds in capturing the slow rhythms of the town, but not entirely. Shots linger unnecessarily, telling us nothing new and saying nothing interesting. While initially successful in creating the sense of a place where nothing ever happens, the technique eventually just gets irritating and boring.

She has a taste for gimmicks, and they sometimes work. A Greek chorus of old men reminiscing about their youth (cars and sex, again) adds welcome laughs and pacing. But she handles a scene where the three leads confess in church with a three-way split screen, which just makes it hard to hear what any one of them is saying.

This hit-and-miss affair left me wanting to see Peña again in a good film. Lone Star, anyone?