The adult world In a person’s life, there will be many unique crises that are often impossible to predict – the sudden death of a loved one, an unexpected dismissal from work, an unplanned pregnancy, an unforeseen default, a natural disaster that scientific minds could not foresee in advance, or an illness that crept out of nowhere. But in the fate of each of us who are lucky enough to live to gray hair, there will be three predetermined crises, to hide from which fantastically manages only a few — adolescence, midlife crisis and sadness and loneliness of old age. We know a lot about the first: pictures about the difficulties of youth can be enumerated endlessly, and their ranks are replenished with stable regularity. The latter, on the contrary, remains a mystery for the viewer behind seven seals - very few directors in their works told about the problems that can lie in wait for a person in old age. The midlife crisis and cinema are in the middle – many authors have taken it as the title or one of the themes of their paintings, but yesterday’s young men and tomorrow’s old men can not boast of the attention that attracts the explosive life of teenagers. Scriptwriter Liz V. Garcia recently entered this second mandatory period of her life, and felt that it was about him, from a female perspective, she wanted to tell in her debut film as a director. But that wasn’t Garcia’s only wish — she also had a staunch nostalgia for her youth in a provincial town and the pool lifeguard she had at the time, keeping abreast of events, watching the locals all day long. From these two bricks - the turmoil of middle age and a slice of the life of the American wilderness and formed the first film Liz V. Garcia "Rescuer".
There are two main challenges that most young independent filmmakers face - the inability to strike a balance between knock-down realism and sleepy routine, and the desire to capture as many topics and questions as possible at once, trying to fit it all into a picture that is unlikely to be longer than ninety minutes. In varying degrees, Liz V. Garcia encountered both of them in her debut - her work tends to be monotonous episodes that are not fully routine, but at the same time they are a repetition of the same, and those minutes could be filled with dialogue or events revealing the character of the characters, most of which were not fully developed. Despite the fact that the picture Garcia has the main character, with whom everything begins and on which everything ends, in her film for the attention of the viewer fight a huge number of completely different, both in age and in life experience characters who face in their lives with completely different problems. The only common denominator for all these people’s stories is the main character and the city in which the film takes place, and their suffering is difficult to reduce to one powerful message that is necessary for any dramatic picture. The director says that she wanted to portray the difficulties of a period when you are soon or slightly over thirty, and you begin to slowly see a picture of what your life will be like to gray in your hair – a constant job, marriage, children, but what if you are not sure that this is all that you dreamed of? However, her main character, despite her numerous statements, runs not from age at all, but from the amazing cruelty of the world, knocking down any finely thinking and feeling person like her, and this crisis is not mandatory for every woman or even a person, and is also not at all related to age, and can overtake at fifty or twenty.
Another problem with Liz V. Garcia’s debut film, which is also characteristic of independent films, is that its optimistic ending does not fit with the rest of the film’s events, many of which are supposed to create even bigger problems, rather than solve old ones, and it is very difficult to understand how the author came to this outcome for the characters and what she meant by them. At this moment, the weak disclosure of the aspirations and dreams of the characters is felt especially acutely - we do not fully understand what they are coming from and the resolution of what dilemmas they are looking for, so when their languid despair suddenly gives way to a happy ending, and the viewer hears that the hero, who has not previously shown special zeal to find out who he is and what he wants to see his life, suddenly knows what he needs, this causes bewilderment. As a result, Liz V. Garcia had a film about one summer, during which a group of mature people threw off all restrictions, plunged into a carefree life with local teenagers, a picture that can sometimes evoke some feelings that the director wanted to convey to his audience, but in general, watching The Rescue Girl is a journey to understand what it is about – about nostalgia or trying to understand how to move forward, about young or middle-aged people, about a woman’s fear of being a wife or mother, or about trying to determine her place in life outside the context of these two classic female roles.