Available at Amazon.com
Directed by
Fernando Eimbcke
Written by
Fernando Eimbcke
Paula Markovitch
Cast
Enrique Arreola ………. Ulises
Diego Cataño ………. Moko
Daniel Miranda ………. Flama
Danny Perea ………. Rita
DVD Release Date: Late August (AKA Currently Available)
Running Time: 88 minutes
Rated: R (Naughty words in Spanish and in sub-titles, drug references)
The Movie
Right off the bat, you can tell that Duck Season is not a Hollywood film. It’s in Spanish. It looks like it was shot on a fraction of Pi‘s budget. It’s a non-noir shot in black and white.
During the course of watching the film, it doesn’t get particularly more Hollywood. It is an R-rated film about young teenagers. Three of our four main characters never leave their apartment building. There is little resolution in the third act, if it can be called a third act as there is a distinct lack of a narrative thread.
The movie starts with 2 minutes and 45 seconds worth of titles over a black screen while a peppy song about ducks plays. After that, we fade in and out over various dilapidated objects. So, by four and a half minutes into the movie, nothing has really been established.
Eventually, our plot starts. The thirteen year old Flama is left home alone for the day, joined by his fourteen year old friend Moko. They proceed to spend most of the movie hanging out, stopping occasionally to chill, and/or keep it real. They are joined by Flama’s neighbor Rita, whose parents have forgotten her 16th birthday, so she decides to bake her own cake. She fails at cake twice, and ends up making “special” brownies instead. Rounding out our group is Ulises, a pizza man whom the boys refuse to pay as he was 11 seconds late in his delivery. Eventually the group eats the brownies, shoot some knickknacks, and call it a day. That is to say, not much happens for a good chunk of Duck Season. There are extended sequences where we watch people play X-box games, and beat eggs. The story is progressed by revealing more about the characters, as opposed to the characters actually doing things.
The camera work in Duck Season is interesting. There are shots looking at our characters from the back of an oven or a cupboard, and other instance of odd camera placement. Combined with the black and white photography, it projects an image of artistry, which ultimately lacks deeper meaning in connection with the story itself. It serves as microcosm to the ultimate flaw in the movie itself: it is never so insightful as it would have you believe.
It sounds like I’m putting down this film, and I am to some extent. That isn’t to say that it is a bad movie. Duck Season has a lot of charm in the simplicity of its character study. It’s also very honest in the matter of its young subjects. It is rare to find a film with such believable and extensive character development for a fourteen year old boy. I’m sure that there are a good number of people who will really be able to connect with this film.
But if you subsist on a steady diet of Michael Bay and the like, this movie is definitely not for you.
The DVD
The DVD is pretty much empty. We get a whopping:
3 Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
1 Available Audio Track: Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Trailers
And that is it. There were also a couple of running glitches on the dvd during the third act. As such, I’d find it hard to justify it’s current Amazon price of $25.
