(2004)
4
Michael Buening
Duck Season fits well into an admirable tradition of modest, naturalistic youth portraits ranging from The 400 Blows to Raising Victor Vargas. Co-released by Alfonso Cuarón's Esperanto Filmoj production company, it shares Cuarón's approach to coming-of-age stories: insightful, respectful, and suffused with youthful whimsy and melancholy. Unlike most youth films, which use visual kinetics as a primary tool, director Fernando Eimbcke and DP Alexis Zabe use long, static shots to detail the action. This technique is undoubtedly due to a meager budget, and attempts to inject some ingenuity to this approach come across as pointlessly distracting -- a shot from inside an oven, a refrigerator, the television, and on a bookshelf. However as the action builds and the minutiae of the boys' day take meaning and shape, these shots form a visual corollary to bored adolescence teetering on the precipice of puberty in a cramped environment. Editor Mariana Rodríguez enhances the visuals with a stubbornly steady rhythm that enhances the few moments of fast-paced action -- when the characters shoot dinner plates with a BB gun, do group headstands, or stuff themselves with junk food. The film is most successful in Eimbcke's refreshing choice not to infuse his young characters with overwrought cynicism or precocious degeneracy. While the future of the children is uncertain, in a wonderful shift in the coming-of-age template Eimbcke gives Ulises, re-invigorated and stirred toward self-reflection by the teenagers, the unambiguously happy resolution. He turns a tacky painting of ducks, which Flama's parents are fighting over, into an effective symbol of the characters' desire for growth and change, the dangers and positive potentials that could result, and the role friends can play in guiding each other through life. His break from post-college lethargy is a touching conclusion to Duck Season's patchy, but multi-layered tale of how long it can take to grow up.
Duck Season on AllMovie
Duck Season (2004)
