Duck Season

[StevePulaski]

Duck Season (2004)
Directed by: Fernando Eimbcke

From left: Enrique Arreola, Daniel Miranda, Diego Cataño and Danny Perea in the foreground in Duck Season.

Rating: ★★★½

Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season is rich in its character observation and details and light on its story's events and plot-progression; I don't know about you guys but I wouldn't have it any other way. At only eighty-seven minutes long, the film paints a beautiful image on the languidness of adolescence and how a lot can happen when a group of people are sitting around doing practically nothing while unsupervised for several hours. If this sounds like a certain American, eighties classic to you, then you're on the right track.

The film captures one of the laziest Sundays I've ever seen that starts with two best friends, who lounge around in one of their own urban apartments in Mexico, when one of their mothers leaves for work. The two fourteen-year-old boys - Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño) - carefully split a bottle of Coca-Cola before sitting on the couch playing Halo. When the power inexplicably goes out, the two are left to their own wits to entertain themselves. They find company by the name of Rita (Danny Perea), a girl who states she's sixteen-years-old and arrives claiming her oven doesn't work and needs to bake herself a cake that will only take about fifteen minutes. She spends the time ruffling through the boys' kitchen while they sit on the couch and look to order a pizza, half mushroom, half salami, just the way they like it.

When the pizza driver, Ulises (Enrique Arreola), arrives just a few seconds late of his thirty minute deadline, the boys refuse to pay him. Ulises won't leave without the money, meaning he isn't going anywhere, despite the boys firm in their jurisdiction not to pay him. Ulises agrees to play Flama in a soccer video game when the power comes back on for a brief time, but even after practically winning, he still finds himself without the cash. The argument isn't about money, we can shortly tell, but it's because there needs to be something to argue about and the boys need to feel like they're taking a firm-but-fair stance on something.

This day continues on, with the quartet of misfits lackadaisically sitting around the apartment, talking endlessly about nothing incredibly significant, looking through cartoon pornography, talking intimately about their homelives, and learning about each other. Why am I rating this so high if I'm elaborating on so little and sounding rather unenthusiastic through my typing? Because this film is about as exciting as living one of these lazy Sundays we're all incredibly aware of, whether we spend the day laying on the couch or in bed, listlessly looking through our phones, watching TV, going online, or doing whatever we may be.

Director Eimbcke, who also co-wrote the film with Paula Markovitch, understands the dreary days of adolescence, where almost nothing but video games, sugary soda, pornography, and pizza make any sense. The kind of day where you sit in a cloud of monotonous funk that hovers of you and serves as a bad case of laziness. What Eimbcke and Markovitch also understand are the directionless - but sometimes incredibly significant - conversations you and your friends may have that could go on to have a strong impact on you as a person. That is what Duck Season is an ode to - those conversations you'll look back on.

Shot on an identifiable shoestring budget, with no-name actors, it's remarkable to say how many aesthetic attributes Duck Season bears to make it more than your average independent film. Wisely shot in black and white to emphasize essence more than color detail, the film's cinematographical work by Alexis Zabe is sublime, as it focuses on the steady-static shot and sharp camera angles over sloppily-photographed camerawork. To combine that, Eimbcke utilizes medium-length shots that are just long enough to establish mood and environmental detail but just short enough so boredom doesn't set in. If you feel your eyes wandering throughout the screen you watch Duck Season on and your mind maybe drifting a bit, congratulations, you're becoming one of the main characters.

Aside from a few tonal inconsistencies that really jog the film's one-setting timeline, Duck Season is an interesting and investing piece of work. It shows the desire for companionship amongst adolescence and the true effect a lazy Sunday (or, in this film's case, "un Domingo perizoso") can have on a gaggle of different individuals; think of The Breakfast Club with a Hispanic cast and you have a marvelous, underrated work of art.

Starring: Daniel Miranda, Diego Cataño, Danny Perea, Enrique Arreola, and Carolina Politi. Directed by: Fernando Eimbcke.