Duck Season: Drama. Starring Daniel Miranda, Diego Catano, Danny Perea and
Enrique Arreola. Directed by Fernando Eimbcke. (Rated R. 85 minutes. At the
Lumiere.)
Little movies can be about very big things, perhaps because an economy of scale lets a film
concentrate on characters instead of green screens. So it goes with the
feature debut from Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke: In “Duck Season,” his
protagonists’ emotional journey plays across the smallest of stages, on 35mm
film, within the confines of one cramped apartment.
It starts like a classic teen flick before meandering off on its own
idiosyncratic way. On a Sunday afternoon, two 14-year-old friends named Flama
(Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Catano) are home alone in the drab flat Flama
shares with his mother, part of an equally drab Mexico City housing project.
They divide a gallon of Coke and embark on a marathon of video games. Rita
(Danny Perea), a teenage neighbor, drops by to use their kitchen. She wants to
make a cake — a birthday cake. For herself.
Baking and gaming ensue. Then the power goes out and a pizza-delivery
dude, Ulises (Enrique Arreola), arrives and refuses to leave (this is because
the boys refuse to pay him). Challenges are thrown down, truths uncovered and
epiphanies sparked while the characters settle in to share a long afternoon of
nothing — and everything. Ulises and Flama battle and finally bond over
their mutually fractured lives while Rita steers Moko down the path of sexual
awakening while cracking eggs into a mixing bowl.
Eimbcke frames his characters’ emotional progress with images that
stagnate — a dilapidated bicycle, the monolithic structures of the housing
complex, blank windows, concrete walls. Flama’s apartment is the most static
environment of all, a stopping-off point in his parents’ messy divorce. On the
surface, ennui rules. But with muted, black-and-white eloquence, the camera
captures the little earthquakes beneath the surface as the foursome grow and
learn about the inevitability of change.
Slumped on the couch, they become fascinated with a kitschy painting of
migrating ducks, which they swear are actually flying across the canvas. They
consider their own movement or lack thereof: Ulises remembers all the wrong
turns his life has taken, including a stint euthanizing dogs at the pound,
recalled in nightmarish flashback. Moko uncovers a secret he didn’t know he
knew, and Flama and Rita think about how to manage their respective family
lives. They destroy a china collection Flama’s parents seem to prize over their
son; they cook up philosophies and pot brownies in the kitchen. Teetering
between ennui and discovery, stasis and change, they stumble through an
obstacle course of illumination, resolution and desire — not necessarily in
that order and occasionally in combination — in the blankness of an empty
afternoon.
The beauty of “Duck Season” is its insistence that profound human
experiences can arrive slowly, in incremental packages, scattered over the
course of an average Sunday. Like Ulises’ namesake, each character has his or
her own microcosmic epic on the table, and each arrives at a different place by
day’s end.
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– Advisory: Teenage sex talk, pot brownies, unnerving scenes at the dog
pound.
E-mail Neva Chonin at nchonin@sfchronicle.com.