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Sometimes the smallest films have the biggest impact. Such is the case with Fernando Eimbcke's one-apartment, one-afternoon Mexican comedy Duck Season. I have a feeling it's going to slap the film world upside the head just like it did me. Like Ozu (the Japanese master gets an acknowledgement in the credits, along with Jim Jarmusch), Eimbcke builds a powerful impression out of a lot of small, nearly everyday occurences. The healthy leavening of comedy makes the eventual punch a greater surprise.
Two 14-year-old boys, Flama and Moko, are left alone for a Sunday afternoon as Flama's mother goes out. A girl from down the hall comes over to use the oven, and soon they have one more visitor who, like them, is bored and a little bit lost. A power outage completes the setup for the hijinks and conflicts that follow. Each one drifts by like a cloud, darkening the sky and then passing without building into what we usually think of as a "plot point." Yet even without a conventional story, Eimbcke has created a meditation on human fellowship and the preciousness of life that at times is deeply affecting. In a question-and-answer session following the film at the San Francisco International Film Festival, producer Jamie B. Ramos said the apartment house where Duck Season takes place is in Tlatelolco, a section of Mexico City where a historic massacre of antigovernment protestors took place in 1968. Like that other foursome, the Beatles, the characters in Duck Season believe in making love, not war, and having fun while getting that point across.