Fernando Eimbcke's LAKE TAHOE (Mexico)

[oscar jubis]

The sophomore effort by the writer/director of Duck Season premiered at the Berlinale in 2008. It won two awards at that festival, including the top critics' prize (FIPRESCI).

Like the debut, Lake Tahoe involves a day in the life of a teenage protagonist. Duck Season took place mostly inside an apartment in the capital and was shot in black and white. Lake Tahoe expands the canvas to a ratio of 2.35:1 and is shot in color. The film opens with the melancholic boy, Juan, crashing his family's Nissan sedan into a pole and concerns the relationships Juan develops with three people he meets through his efforts to get the car fixed: an elderly man who owns a big dog and a garage, a young mother who aspires to front a punk band, and a teen mechanic obsessed with martial arts. Throughout the course of the day, we increasingly become acquainted with Juan's family and their despondency.

Eimbcke displays a deadpan brand of humor and genuine pathos reminiscent of Aki Kaurismaki as well as the Finnish director's static camera setups. However, Lake Tahoe derives a great deal of originality from its unusual setting: a little, underpopulated town in the west coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, far from touristy Cancun. Eimbcke frequently cuts to black in between scenes without interrupting the soundtrack. Thus, we only hear not watch the car crash and a fight scene from Enter the Dragon, which is playing at the local theater. This device has apparently inspired some reviewers to compare the film with early Jarmusch but the connection is likely to give a false impression because Eimbcke's humanistic warmth is antithetical to the American auteur's cool-hip tone. In my opinion, the blackouts are sometimes purposeless although they lend the film stylistic consistency. However, Lake Tahoe evidences growth in Eimbcke's ability to imbue his narratives with gravity and weight without an appreciative loss of spontaneity and grace.

Lake Tahoe is being distributed theatrically on a limited basis by Film Movement (The film will be released on DVD to the general public in November).

[Howard Schumann]

LAKE TAHOE

Directed by Fernando Eimbcke, (2008), 81 minutes

In Fernando Eimbcke’s minimalist Lake Tahoe, family members shut off emotional expression to avoid coming to grips with a devastating loss. Teenager Juan (Diego Catano) wraps his Nissan car around a pole, then spends most of the film reaching out to others to help him fix his car, masking his need for emotional connection; Joaquin (Yemil Sefani), the younger sibling hides in a tent while the boys’ mother (Mariana Elizondo) remains for long hours in the bathtub without communicating. It is only late in the film that we find out the reason for this emotional turmoil.

Nominated for the Golden Bear Award and winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival as well as several honors at the Mexican Academy Awards, Lake Tahoe is set in Chicxulub, near Progreso, Yucatan, the area where a devastating asteroid was alleged to have hit the earth 65 million years ago. Shot with mostly wide-angle static shots and filled with natural light, Lake Tahoe captures the lazy mood of a town with its vast empty spaces, sparse vegetation, and low flat-roofed buildings. The film takes its name from a bumper sticker on the family car from an Aunt who visited the famous California resort some years ago and whose meaning is revealed later in the film.

The film is quiet and moves very slowly with an undercurrent of sadness, though it is not without tension and its arc is unpredictable. Interrupted periodically with blank screens (reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger in Paradise), the dark screens seemingly provide the characters with time to pause and reflect. After Juan crashes his red Nissan, he spends most of the day trying to find a part to get the car running again and, in the process, must deal with a variety of eccentric townspeople. His first contact, the elderly Don Heber (Hector Herrera), a retired mechanic, hasn’t seen the car but confidently tells him he needs a new distributor harness.

Heber takes his time, telling Juan to look for the part himself as he takes care of his dog Sica, feeding him breakfast from the kitchen table while the bewildered Juan looks on unamused. Juan also must contend with Lucia (Daniela Valentine), a clerk at an auto repair shop as they wait together silently for hours for Lucia’s colleague, David (Juan Carlos Lara II) to show up. Lucia is a single mother, perhaps only a few years older than Juan, who must care for an infant boy that Juan seems to know how to get to go to sleep. Lucia wants him to listen to her music and tries to get him to babysit her small child but Juan almost always says no before agreeing to anything. David turns out to be a Kung Fu expert and a devotee of the martial arts and a source of comic relief throughout the film.

He invites Juan to the cinema to see “Enter the Dragon”, a martial arts movie and then tries to engage him in a kicking contest while Juan stands there passively until David shouts at him in true Bruce Lee tones that he needs emotional content, not anger. When Juan goes home, he finds his little brother Joaquin playing in a tent in the yard while his mother hides in the bathtub, telling everyone to leave her alone. "What's 'condolences'?" Joaquin asks his older brother. He says that "people have been calling all day, and when I answer, everyone says... accept their condolences."

Though only 81 minutes long, Lake Tahoe feels organic and not written, capturing the real emotions of people who seem unable to communicate their grief. One telling scene is when Lucia and Juan fall into each other’s arms and Juan begins to cry, the only emotion he has shown throughout the film, other than hitting his car with a baseball bat. Diego Catana is excellent as Juan who appears in every scene and carries the film with an honest and effortless performance. Like Broken Wings, an Israeli film from 2002 with a similar theme, Lake Tahoe transcends the limitations of time and place to become a universal exploration of loss and how people respond to it. In Eimbcke's skillful hands, its sadness is relieved by the strength and dignity of its characters and balanced with a dry, deadpan humor that would be the envy of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki.

GRADE: A-

[Chris Knipp]

I also love this short feature, and wrote about it last year when it was shown at the New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center, NYC. My review (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2473-Film-Comments-Selects-And-New-Directors-New-Films-2009&p=21422#post21422) is in the Festival Coverage section, but I'll re-post it on this main thread. Posters indicate that this movie is coming to Landmark theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area soon, though I don't know the release plans.


FERNANDO EIMBCKE: LAKE TAHOE (2008)--FCS

http://www.directorsnotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/lake_tahoe01tif_rgb.jpg
DANIELA VALENTINE, DIEGO CATANO

Kung Fu, car parts, and babysitting in the Yucatan

Lake Tahoe is a work of inspired minimalism formally laid out in luminous long shots--long and thin, because of a wide aspect ratio--and cut into segments with blackouts as in early Jim Jarmusch. As in Eimbcke's 2004 first film, Duck Season, the protagonist is a teenage boy, whose meandering day seems a combination of Kafkaesque delays and the manana spirit but gradually reveals a sense of dislocation due to personal loss. Someone important has died in his family. His mother (Mariana Elizondo) is smoking and weeping in the bathtub, and later lies asleep. His little brother Joaquin (Yemil Sefani) sits in a little tent in the backyard clipping football photos and later crouches in a bedroom closet.

But the morning begins for Juan (Duck Seasn's Diego Catano) not at home but wandering on the road. He crashes the family's little old red Nissan into a tree (we just hear the crash in a blackout between static shots and then see the car and the tree). Juan is unharmed but the car won't start. A droll series of frustrations follows as he goes around on foot trying to get help at one garage after another. Juan needs a mechanic and instead people want his help and his friendship. These include an old man, a scrawny Bruce Lee fanatic who takes Juan back and forth to his Nissan on a rickety old bike, and a young woman with a small baby that stops crying and begins to coo whenever Juan holds it.

Eimbcke makes good use of the stillness of his young actor and of the camera. The old garage owner, Don Heber (Hector Herrera) takes Juan for a thief and has his dog, Sika, keep guard while he searches first for the phone then for the phone book to call the police. But the phone is dead, and before long Don Heber is sitting down to a cereal breakfast with Juan. When Juan declines ("I've had breakfast") Don Heber says "Sika!" and the dog jumps up on the table and eagerly consumes Juan's bowl of cereal. Don Heber decides without seeing the car what part is broken (the distributor harness) and tells Juan to look for it in his garage, then falls asleep in a hammock.

David (Juan Carlos Lara II), who's about the same age as Juan, boasts of his prowess as a mechanic, but disappears for long periods. While waiting for him in the doorway of a parts shop Juan gets to know Lucia (Daniela Valentine). He's also sidetracked to a meal at David's. While David is a fanatic of martial arts and invites Juan to a Kung Fu movie that evening, David's mother tries to convert Juan to her born-again Christianity.

It's Juan's deadpan manner and the deliberately ineloquent camera that help make the various incidents droll and somehow touching. Lucia wants something of Juan too: for him to babysit her baby, Fidel (Joshua Habid) so she can go to a concert.

Every shot seems to fall into the spaces defined by a quiet maze of low white buildings, graffiti and sunlight, as if all the locations in the little town were scattered in a small circle. Each image is beautifully composed and shot by cinematographer Alexis Zabe: even the shots of Juan driving the car, shot from outside the windshield, happen in lovely sun-kissed shadow. As he wanders around Juan passes by his modest family house, which is cozy and interesting inside, but full of emptiness. It's these touch-downs at "home" that show Juan's life has broken free of its moorings. It's emotional confusion as much as the day's circumstances that explains how Juan's come to be adrift in time. And yet he both retains a sense of purpose (and gets David to fix the car) and still has time to connect further with Don Heber, David, and Lucia, returning after a magical night away to fix hotcakes for Joaquin and add one significant touch from the front bumper of the now-revived car to complete Joaquin's scrapbook of their lost family member.

Lake Tahoe is only 81 minutes long and is a marvel in its use of limited means to charm, to create a unique (yet familiar and believable) world and to develop character and touch us with few words and few gestures. Though the blackouts may remind one of Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise,, Eimbcke carries them further, making them last longer and stand for the passage of time and also enriching them by continuing the sound track over the blackness, notably and drolly the screams and screeches of Kung Fu masters as Juan watches the Shaolin classic in a darkened cinema with David. The blackouts symbolize stoppage but also show Juan's life leaping forward even as he sits stymied.

Shown in February 2009 at the Walter Reade Theater of Lincoln Center, NYC, as part of the Film Comment Selects series.