‘Garcia Girls’ forgot sizzle

The answer to the implied question in “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer” is straightforward enough: The Garcia girls had sex. And some awkward foreplay.

Harder to ascertain is how writer-director Georgina Riedel managed to take such titillating elements – car fetishes, border-town taboos and libidinous Mexican-American chicas – and process them all into such a languid, overlong snooze. Stiff dialogue and static camerawork, I guess. Oh, and no small amount of minimalist self-importance.

Riedel's inertia-plagued mother-daughter bonding begins when 70-year-old Dona Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo) shuffles down to the local used-car lot in the dusty hamlet of Somerton, Ariz., and purchases a rusted, sputtering coupe – this despite never having driven a day in her life. When Dona's divorced, careworn daughter Lolita (Elizabeth Peña from “Lone Star”) scolds her mother for wasting her meager Social Security income on a worthless impulse buy, the old lady is defiant.

“I think it's cool,” Lolita's teenage daughter, Blanca (a pre-“Ugly Betty” America Ferrera), says of Dona's automotive ambitions. “You think it's cool that your grandmother is going to kill herself?” Lolita shoots back, ever the worrywart.

The car – not Dona's car, but the “car” as a cosmic entity – plays a prominent role in Riedel's folksy, sprawling script. The “car” is the sole focus of Blanca's flirtations with a hunky classmate (Rick Najera). The “car” is where a hot-and-bothered Lolita fights off the advances of the town's resident adulterous playboy (Steven Bauer). And the “car” is where Dona embarks on an uneasy, sexually charged courtship with her gardener (Jorge Cervera Jr.).

And let's not forget Riedel's faux-doc interviews with a gallery of Spanish-speaking graybeards, who fondly recall the cars and women of their youth. So what is Riedel trying to tell us here? That a man's car is his sexual plumage? Hey, stop the presses. But Riedel keeps pressing the point, weirdly.

This intense thematic fixation stands in jarring contrast to the blasé cinematic tempo of “Garcia Girls,” with its long spacing and exaggerated subtlety.

First screened in 2005, “Garcia Girls” kicked around in festival limbo for a year and probably would never have seen the light of commercial distribution if not for Ferrera's rise in “Ugly Betty” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” As the sweet, boy-curious Blanca, the young star gives a perfectly competent performance, but you can literally see her groping for importance and meaning in certain dud scenes. Two-plus hours of conflict-free drama? Summer is too precious.

“How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer”
Stars: America Ferrera, Elizabeth Peña, Lucy Gallardo
Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Georgina Riedel
Rated: R (sexual content)
Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes
Grade: C-