Duck Season

This very agreeably droll first feature covers a momentous few hours in the lives of a couple of 14-year-old inhabitants of the projects of Mexico City. It’s Sunday lunchtime, and Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño) are embarking on their same old like-clockwork weekly get-together: no parents, music they like, porn, Playstation, pizza delivered… But this time things don’t go to plan: first, they’re interrupted by Rita (Danny Perea), a neighbour’s maid who demands use of their oven to bake a cake, then by Ulises (Enrique Arreola), whose 11-seconds-late delivery of the pizza provokes the pals to refuse payment. In turn he refuses to leave the apartment – and then the electricity goes down…
Cue mutual recrimination and regret, improvisation and experimentation, and – after a while – contemplation of friendship, identity, the purpose of life and the significance of the ducks in an awful wall-painting… From his simple premise, Eimbcke slowly but surely constructs a subtle, multi-layered black comedy of the existentialist kind, as the four characters ruminate and riff on opportunities taken and missed, dreams and disappointments, pasts, presents and futures, reality and… well, whatever it is they experience while out of their heads. Inventively shot with minimal resources, perfectly paced and beautifully played by the young cast, the film adopts the lightest of touches to grasp a fistful of big questions, somehow managing to be simultaneously tough, tender, funny and fresh. Its very modesty is both essential to its emotional authenticity and part and parcel of its enormous charm. Further delicious evidence of the reviving fortunes of Latin American
cinema.