'Garcia Girls' has a good heart
A quiet but sexy little indie film with a sharp eye and a good heart, "How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer" shows us a highly believable Mexican-American family in an Arizona border town where everything seems hot, dusty and a little nondescript.
It's a place that writer-director-producer Georgina Garcia Riedel builds up with such offhand ease and telling detail that we can feel the heat and dust, smell the food, feel the thump of the car engines, and wilt under the heaviness and lassitude of the long summer days winding lazily down.
Garcia Riedel makes it all come alive for us, effortlessly. So does her cast, especially the three lead actresses who play three generations of the Garcia family: grandmother Dona Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo), mom Lolita (Elizabeth Pena) and teenage daughter Blanca (the indomitable America Ferrera).
All these women are single or unattached and have problems with males over the summer. They all respond in different but convincing, comic or moving ways.
Dona Genoveva slides into her romance with the equally on-in-years Don Pedro (Jorge Cervera) tenderly and hesitantly, trying to preserve a few old courtship ways, while taking on some lusty new ones.
Lolita, after first drowning her lonely sorrow in neurosis and booze, is torn in two directions: between slimy married philanderer Victor Reyes (Steven Bauer of De Palma's "Scarface," who nails this creep) and her own nice-guy butcher-shop-boss Jose Luis (Rick Najera).
Blanca, played by the sparkling, earthy young star of "Real Women Have Curves" and "Ugly Betty," just smiles at an appealing young stranger (Leo Minaya as garage boy Sal) when he invites her for a ride, and she jumps right in.
It's a sign of the way filmmaker Garcia Riedel mixes her sympathies between old and new that it's Dona Genoveva who ultimately has the easiest time of it. The summer's affairs, in fact, are ignited when the spunky 70-year-old, who can't drive, decides to buy a car. Don Pedro volunteers as her driving teacher.
The movie is unshowy but very realistic in its overview and in all kinds of small details. All the actors are exemplary. Most affecting perhaps is Gallardo, who once acted for the great Luis Bunuel in his surreal 1962 classic "The Exterminating Angel," and who shows a bravery about sex that's almost unnerving.
Nobody can top Ferrera, though: She smiles like a cat and holds the screen as if it's her birthright. Garcia Riedel is lucky to have this cast and her life to draw on.
And they're lucky to have her.
"How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer"
3 stars out of four
Starring: America Ferrera, Elizabeth Pena, Steven Bauer, Lucy Gallardo
Directed and written by: Georgina Garcia Riedel
Other: A Maya Releasing release. Rated R (language, sexual situations). 128 minutes.