Duck Season (Temporada de Patos)
Directed by Fernando Eimbcke
A master class in doing more with less, Fernando Embcke's delightful Duck Season finds a whole world inside a small, cluttered Mexico city apartment, where two barely-adolescent pals, Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño) are spending the day alone. Flama's newly-single mom is gone for the day, and he and Moko plan to pass the time by playing videogames, ordering a pizza and drinking lots of soda. The only wild card is the surprise appearance of their upstairs neighbor Rita (Danny Perea), who has come over to bake a cake in their kitchen.
When the power goes out, all bets are off. The boys order a pizza, but the moped-riding pizza guy Ulises (Enrique Arreola), who had to climb multiple flights of stairs because the elevator was out of commission, is 11 seconds late, which prompts the boys to play hardass and refuse to pay him.
Ulises, a good man who's reached the end of his rope, announces he's not leaving until he gets paid, and to the boys' astonishment, he actually means it. Between the deadpan stare-downs, newly-forged relationships, ghastly silences and continually shifting allegiances (Rita invites Moko to help her bake a cake so she can do something about her crush on him and Ulises gives Flama the mix of tough love and philosophical affection his absent father can't provide), we feel as if we've entered delightfully unfamiliar territory.
Like the three principal characters in Rebel Without a Cause, the four inhabitants of this apartment enact an affectionate but sexually messed-up parody of a nuclear family, with Rita and Ulises standing in for Flama's absent mom and dad (who are not yet done with their bitter divorce) and Moko standing in for the brother Flama never had.
The first thing to admire about Duck Season is its droll tone. Some reviews have invoked Jim Jarmusch—the go-to comparison for any black-and-white movie with quirky characters and a lot of static camera setups—but the comparison only goes so far. Eimbecke and cinematographer Alexis Zabe take the comedy to a higher level by reinforcing verbal gags and revealing character moments with compositions that reinforce the story's narrative arc.
Duck Season's visual scheme changes as the characters get to know each other, moving from stasis, loneliness and inertia (signified by many locked-down, symmetrical master shots) to curious, active engagement (as the story unfolds, the filmmakers shift to asymmetrical shots and handheld, moving closeups that follow the actors bodies and gesturing hands). The strategy is pursued so unobtrusively that it isn't until much later that you realize how intimately the images join with the script. Note, for instance, the dialogue pertaining to palindromes—words comprised of mirrored words which, when split in half, reflect each other; they're of a piece with the mirrored shots—not just the symmetrical masters, but medium shots in which a character confronts his own reflection. The idea of "reflection" is further deepened by naturalistic monologues that let characters flash back to small but significant moments in their lives (another type of reflection).
I hope that in dwelling on the filmmaking, I haven't made Duck Season sound like a dry, academic movie. Except for an ill-advised, just-in-case-you-didn't-get-it monologue explaining the significance of the title (a mural showing ducks in migration that's the object of a mama/papa dispute), Eimbcke rarely calls attention to the movie's cinder-block density.
Every minute there's a small, perfectly judged moment of human behavior: the boys pouring two sodas and making sure each glass contains exactly the same amount; Moko and Rita sneaking hits of Reddi-Whip; the four exhausted characters lounging around in the living room, eating cake with their hands. It’s a multifacted crowd-pleaser that can be enjoyed as a teen romance, a coded domestic drama or an existential comedy, and it never gets so wrapped up in its own intricacies that it forgets to amuse you.
