Duck Season

An apartment in Mexico City on a Sunday. Flama and Moko are fourteen and alone in the flat; the plan is simple, video games, fizzy drinks and pizza. Then the power goes out. Ulises the delivery man arrives late and will not leave without being paid. Rita, the neighbour, asks to borrow the kitchen to bake a cake, and stays too. Four people are stuck in the same flat for a day. Fernando Eimbcke writes and directs in his first film. It was shot in black and white and takes place almost entirely in the one flat. The camera is mostly fixed, the scenes are long and the cutting is sparse. The comedy comes out of waiting. Nothing happens, and the nothing forces the characters to talk; what emerges is not a teen comedy but a film built on boredom itself. Ulises is the heart of it. The delivery man looks like an obstacle at first, and as the day goes on turns out to be the loneliest person in the film. There is a separating family in the background. That is what the film is actually touching, and it is never spoken about; the situation between Flama's parents is sensed only through phone calls and an argument over furniture. It won a large number of Ariel awards in Mexico and established Eimbcke as one of the important names in the new Mexican cinema. Who it is for: viewers who like minimal comedy and single location films. Who it is not for: nothing happens, the pace is deliberately low, and the ending closes quietly.