How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer: Drama. Starring America Ferrera, Elizabeth Peña, Lucy Gallardo, Steven Bauer, Jorge Cervera Jr. and Leo Minaya. Directed by Georgina Garcia Riedel. (R. 128 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Elizabeth Peña shares an extended scene with a vibrator in “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer.” She plays the middle Garcia, Lolita, sandwiched between her 70-year-old mother, Doña (Lucy Gallardo), and teenage daughter Blanca (America Ferrera). Lolita enlists the help of a vibrator after abruptly ending a relationship with a married man.

The camera lingers on Peña’s face far too long, making much of the audience unwilling voyeurs. We get the picture without needing to watch the process of sexual release unfold in what seems like real time.

Simulating sexual heat is tricky. Tennessee Williams was the master because he had an unerring ear for how lovers talk and behave and because his dramas revealed something about the characters besides a lot of skin.

Georgina Garcia Riedel, who wrote and directed the highly unsatisfying “Garcia Girls,” clearly is no Williams – or even Grace Metalious, whose “Peyton Place” was considerably more entertaining.

Riedel creates a Peyton Place in an Arizona border town where everybody knows everybody’s else’s business. There isn’t much else to do besides snoop and have sex.

While Lolita rings up an order at the butcher shop where she works, she’s berated by a customer for being a home wrecker. Others pile on insults between orders of pork. This scene illustrates Riedel’s idea of drama, pitched at the level of soaps. But one thing she does well is communicate boredom, a mood displayed here in abundance.

“Garcia Girls” gets off to an unpromising start with a contrived symmetry. Each generation of the Garcia clan is supplied with a man to get her through the long, hot, boring summer.

There’s a quaint touch in starting with Doña. By buying her first car – never mind that she can’t drive – Doña is looking to expand her world. A local gardener, Don Pedro (a mischievous Jorge Cervera Jr.), volunteers to teach her to drive. When he ends up in her bed, Lolita is furious at her mother, just as she is later furious with Blanca’s interest in a man – even though Mom is herself on the make. Peña’s hysteria is grating and one-note. You’d expect Lolita to talk differently to her mother than her daughter.

After her affair with the town womanizer, Victor (a ruggedly handsome Steven Bauer), fizzles, Lolita has another shot with her boss, a one-armed butcher whom she seduces by showing up at work in a bright red cocktail dress. Well, at least she needn’t worry about spilling blood on it.

Probably most of the interest will be in Blanca’s attraction to Sal (Leo Minaya), a stud who rides into town trailing rumors of a pregnant girlfriend left behind. Ferrera shows the warmth and star quality that would within months of this film’s completion win her the title role in “Ugly Betty.”

Blanca’s lovemaking has all the fervor of youth. In these scenes, you can see what the movie might have been if the director hadn’t been so intent on giving everyone equal time. There’s also an amusing bit between Blanca and a girlfriend. Told by their dates that they smell like virgins, the girls check each other out for a particular odor.

Riedel reveals herself to be a novice filmmaker, especially in the pacing of most scenes. Some go on forever (take Lolita’s dildo, please), and others are truncated. But she shows a painterly eye for shots of a car on the open road with the sun shining through.

Just to clear up any confusion, “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer” is no relation to Julia Alvarez’s best-selling 1992 novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” But the seeds of a summer franchise are here.

I have just 11 words for you: “How the Garcia Girls Take on Iron Man, Batman and Hellboy.”

source: sfgate.com