Dir. Fernando Eimbcke , 2004, Mexico, 90 mins
Cast:
Enrique Arreola, Diego Catano, Daniel Miranda, Danny Perea
In amongst the recent spate of Mexican films featuring dogfights, sexed-up road trips, sinful priests, bus hijackings, rapes, stabbings and assassinations comes Duck Season - a film about eating pizza and playing Xbox. Granted - it sounds about as exciting as watching Gael Garcia Bernal do a crossword, but Fernando Eimbcke's debut feature is a refreshing and amusing tale that ponders some big ideas on a small scale.
Flama and Moko are two fourteen-year-old pals left alone in a poky apartment on a Sunday afternoon. Content to hunker down and play computer games while stuffing their faces with junk food and coke, things start to go wrong when they refuse to pay their pizza deliveryman for being 11 seconds late. He stubbornly maroons himself in the flat until they cough up the cash. As the boys' day of lazy hedonism unravels, yet more hurdles are thrown in their way. The electricity goes out. A pushy young neighbour commandeers their oven to cook her own birthday cake. Clumsy adolescent sexual urges get in the way of everything, the cake-baking Rita's direct advances and a homoerotic tension brewing between the two young leads.
Shot in black and white, the film is constructed as a slow burning series of comic vignettes that are occasionally hilarious, often trivial, but always intriguing. Between the humorous sketches though, Eimbcke touches on darker themes. The thwarted dreams of adulthood, the depressed Mexican job market, the frustration and aggression of youth, urban degradation, confused sexuality and the breakdown of the family unit are all carefully woven into the narrative, but remain lingering in the background rather than overtly pointed out. For example, an opening montage of monochrome images of decaying buildings and empty streets says as much about their damaged Mexican surroundings as the high-octane urban violence of Amores Perros.
Eimbcke spent months hanging out with his young cast of non-professional actors in order to get inside the mind of contemporary adolescents. Vegetating with his teenage stars for hours, playing their computer games and listening to their music, it's amazing he ever mustered the energy to get up and make the film. "I wanted to make a movie about adolescents out of respect for their constant need of searching, for their rejection of the established, for their abandon, their energy, and because adolescents may not know what they want, but they know very well what they do not want."
Indeed, both Catana and Miranda as the slovenly youngsters turn in convincing performances that seem to have been drawn from their own experiences rather than ideas forced from a director. This gives the film a sense of realism, which is both a strength and at times its undoing. Aside from a surreal interlude involving the ducks of the title and a moment of fun with air guns, there is little in the way of compelling action. Instead the general tone of the film is quirkily mundane and at times plods on unremarkably. A few very funny scenes do crop up though, notably involving the consequences of using Mum's "special herbs" to bake brownies. Eimbcke's sparse narrative is the opposite of how the Hollywood model would treat this Home Alone-style premise. Rather than manic "How can we clear up the house before Mom gets back!?" zaniness, Duck Season 's storyline and characters seem to exist outside of time, a little bubble of goofing around. The only interruption and reminder of the outside world is the occasional hassle from the Pizza Company.
Enrique Arreola is suitably pathetic as the disappointed deliveryman, Ulises, who hates his job and had higher aims for himself. Eventually giving in to the situation he has landed in, Ulises soon realises that he has something to learn about his own life from these miniature slackers. Duck Season 's resolution is open ended - which quite honestly seems to be the get out clause for too many indie films that refuse to conform to convention. Consequently, we are left with the sense that these characters have changed in some unspecified way, but carry on with their lives.
Slow, ponderous and vague, Duck Season is nonetheless a charming, quirky and original addition to the current stock of decent Mexican cinema. More than a doodle, less than a classic, Duck Season may yet signify a new type of filmmaker evolving in the region. Instead of another Mexican Scorsese, Eimbcke could well become the Shane Meadows of Latin American cinema.
Paul Mallaghan
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