Are you in the market for another dramatic, sexy, life-altering Latino film to round out your collection, a companion for your "Y Tu Mama Tambien" (2001) and "Amores Perros" (2000), perhaps? Are you in the mood for a little Diego Luna, maybe a touch of Gael Garc?a Bernal? Want to watch their drug use and lots of threesomes, and most importantly, all sans shirts?
Look no further than the newest masterpiece from Mexico, "Duck Season." Just change Bernal and Luna into 14-year-olds, substitute the threesomes with closed-mouth kissing, trade cocaine and heroin for a small amount of pot, and presto - you have "Duck Season." First released in 2004 as "Temporado de Patos," it has won 24 awards and garnered eight nominations, proving its universal nature and quirky appeal.
The film commences with a slow, black and white montage of the streets of Mexico City, which dissolves into a telling shot of our main characters, teenaged boys braving the boredom of a Sunday afternoon by stocking up on Coca-Cola, video games, chips and parental funds needed for the essential pizza-ordering that will come.
As the boys (played perfectly by Diego Cata?±o and Daniel Miranda) perform their weekly routine alone in an apartment devoid of parents and responsibility, their 16-year-old next door neighbor, Rita (Danny Perea), stops by to use the oven and ends up staying the whole day.
Add to this scenario the quirky, spiritually-lost pizza delivery man, Ulises (Enrique Arreola) and, bingo! You have a brilliant character study set solely in the black and white scenes of the apartment during brief power failures.
As the characters contemplate customary adolescent and adult issues - Ulises is an animal-lover that one job ago was killing dogs abandoned on the streets of Mexico City - they become closer themselves. Soon we see the characters bonding, talking, joking, smoking pot, rejoicing in video games and gazing into the lonely abyss that is the rest of the apartment.
With one of the boys grappling with his parents' pending divorce, the film also screams of adult struggles and critical adolescent junctures. The characters are consistently reminded of the divorce by a cheesy painting of flying ducks, now a bitter source of contention, hanging above the TV.
Thus this small community of three teenagers and an adult is a perfect case study of each stage of our lives and the perplexities we are fated to battle through and against at every rung of our vitality. The movie's main themes are centered on companionship, aging and self-fulfillment.
Director and co-writer Fernando Eimbcke spent weeks devising whole life stories for each character so that each actor would know every memory, each event that had brought them to this point in their lives. This preparation shows: the characters are both articulately devised and more than believable. And they are some of the most likeable characters to grace the screen in recent memory. If every director could do such a thing, characters would usurp plot development.
However, besides these acute main characters, the film has little else to offer. In fact, the film's set and dialogue would be better served in a playhouse, not a movie theater.
Although the movie's angles are visually stimulating and its choice of black and white film an expert decision, it leaves the viewer with little else but contentment when leaving the screening. A movie's responsibility is to convey something bigger than that. It is easy to see what went wrong here.
Many indie films, particularly low-budget ones, are more about character musings than mainstream plot developments or celebrity acting. They rely, instead, on subtle characters and quirky action. But if this indie-type movie were to combine its well-founded characters with an equally uncompromising plot, it could be brilliant. Instead, it seems we're always missing one or the other.
The long stretches of silence that the movie embraces as reality are too awkward, and they make "Duck Season" seem underdeveloped and bland. In fact, most of the film's flavor stems from Arreola's brilliant acting as pizza man Ulises.
Ulises, possibly the most hapless character of all, is easily the most pitiable through his goofy yet authentic depiction of a man who states, "Opportunities are like bullets, and I've already shot mine." Tragic, but it is the stuff great character sketches are made of.
It is, all told, a movie you will enjoy watching, and a movie that, above all, gains viewer sympathy. Amidst its elemental quirks, however, it misses a touch of that sparkle that compels a trip to the theater in the first place. Without this sparkle, it is the mere skeleton of a good movie: fundamentally strong, but overall lacking that movie magic.
