How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

Entirely in keeping with the nature of the inhabitants of the sleepy town, the camera of Georgina Garcia Riedel is not in a hurry. She takes plenty of time to capture the languid mood in images, with dialogue and music being kept to a minimum. In this surprising directing début about emancipation, desire and loneliness, Garcia Riedel does not shun silences and ’empty’ shots. During a sweltering summer, three women in a Mexican-American family undergo a massive change in their sexual consciousness. It all starts when grandmother Doña Genoveva decides to buy a car. She doesn’t have a driving license, but her gardener Pedro helps her with driving lessons. The two spend a lot of time together and that’s the talk of the small village. This to the great dissatisfaction of Genoveva’s daughter Rosa. She is divorced and as a result tries extra hard to live up to social conventions. Until the married macho Victor (played by Steven Bauer, Manny in Scarface) starts making advances and brings her sexual feelings out of hibernation. Granddaughter Blanca hangs around in the street with her girlfriends. Their only pastime is the occasional ride in one of the boys’ pick-up trucks. Here and there the film has a lightly comic and documentary character. For instance, in the inserts of the deserted streets of the town and the old men sitting on the bench reminiscing about their cars – or was it about their wives? (SdH)