“Duck Season”Warner Independent PicturesDirected by Fernando EimbckeWritten by Fernando Eimbcke and Paula MarkovitchStarring: Diego Catao, Daniel Miranda, Enrique Arreola and Danny PereaRated R/90 minutesOpened April 15, 2006Three out of four stars
This is the way it used to be way back when. You had the house to yourself. You had your best friend over-maybe even a few miscellaneous others-and you just sat around all day playing video games. You ordered a pizza. You talked about everything and nothing. You had no responsibilities. You hadn’t a care in the world.
Oh, to be 14 again.
Fernando Eimbcke’s “Duck Season” is embedded with the kind of nostalgia and fondness with which so many of us remember the carelessness of youth. For that and other reasons, this movie is kind of a treasure-a film infused with so many small delights that it just makes you long for the good old days. Was life ever this simple?
“Duck Season” is about as minimalist as movies get these days. It’s shot in plain black-and-white, there are only four characters, almost everything takes place inside one small apartment in one long afternoon and the plot…well, there isn’t much of one. The film is episodic in nature, featuring one scene after another that wonderfully captures a day in the life of a teenager.
Well, three teenagers, to be exact…and a pizza delivery guy.
It’s another lazy Sunday for Moko (Diego Catao) and Flama (Daniel Miranda), two 14-year-old best friends. They’re over at Moko’s house for the day, and his mom is out of town.
They sit down for a day’s worth of XBox, playing one of those addictive first-person shooter games (they argue over who gets to be Bin Laden and who gets to be Bush). They’re armed with a bottle of Coke, a bowl of potato chips and 200 pesos for a large pizza (half mushroom, half salami). And then their 16-year-old neighbor, Rita (Danny Perea) interrupts, saying she needs to use their oven because hers is broken. They ignore her and go back to their game?and then the power goes out.
They order a pizza, but the deliveryman Ulises (Enrique Arreola) arrives 11 seconds too late. As per the company’s guarantee, the pizza should be free?but Ulises won’t go away. He wants his money. The power comes back on, so Moko challenges him to a game of FIFA 2005, winner takes all. And then?
Oh, but these details don’t really matter. Suffice it to say that the pizza man just won’t go away, and Rita takes much longer baking her cake than the “just 15 minutes” she originally promised. The four of them lounge around the apartment all day and we lounge right with them, discovering new insights and secrets about each one.
“Duck Season” never devolves into melodrama, rather keeping its balance as a funny, real, slice-of-life narrative.
