Duck Season
director Fernando Eimbcke continues to refine his signature style – long,
static takes, rhythmic (and often transitional) cuts to black, silence pregnant
with both humor and sorrow – with
Lake
Tahoe, another tale of a boy abandoned by adults. That narrative
similarity, however, isn’t immediately apparent from Eimbcke’s set-up, which
begins by following teenage Juan (Diego Cataño) as he attempts to locate a part
needed to fix the car he just smashed into a light pole. This odyssey is framed
in geometrically immaculate master shots of the boy set against looming
environments and structures, though this visual distance doesn’t preclude
emotional attachment, as the filmmaker milks his compositions for both arid humor
and humanistic tenderness. During the course of his day, Juan comes into
contact with a number of amusing eccentrics, from a garage owner who makes Juan
quietly wait while he and his dog eat cereal at the kitchen table, to a young
mother named Lucia (Daniela Valentine) who attempts to recruit Juan as a
babysitter. Still, Eimbcke’s Jarmusch-ian comedy is laced with something
stronger, and as
Lake Tahoe lackadaisically
(if purposefully) progresses, a strain of melancholy wrought from loss and
longing emerges. It’s a shift that sneaks up on the viewer but one that’s
nonetheless earned by the film’s empathetic attentiveness to character and, specifically,
to Juan’s drifting search for a means of coping with death and the newfound
responsibilities it entails. Eimbcke’s wry portraits (including a would-be
mechanic kid obsessed with Bruce Lee) have a winsome soulfulness that help the
action avoid condescension, and his imagery is often indelible, from a slow
zoom into a bathroom where only a mother’s cigarette-wielding hand is visible
from behind the tub’s curtain, to a tender, beautiful close-up of Lucia singing
and bopping along to her radio’s feisty pop song.
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