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'Duck Season' takes risks that don't pay off

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the low-key Mexican film "Duck Season," first-time director Fernando Eimbcke embraces inertia as an artistic statement the way Jim Jarmusch once did in his movies.

You know, the old nothing's-happening-so-everything's-happening gambit.

Warner Independent Pictures

'Duck Season'

C+

The verdict: A fitfully interesting movie about nothing that might have been really something if done by the old "Seinfeld" gang.

Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Starring: Enrique Arreola, Diego Cataño, Daniel Miranda, Danny Perea
Run time: 90 minutes
Release date: March 10, 2006
Rating: R for language and some drug content.
Language: In Spanish with English subtitles.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

It was tiresome until Jarmusch grew up a little and started making movies like "Dead Man." It's somewhat less tedious here, because the adolescent protagonists' cluelessness makes the torpor more endurable.

One Sunday afternoon, 14-year-old best pals, Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño) are left home alone by Flama's mom, whose only instructions are to keep an eye on the pilot light and the coffee maker. Otherwise, they've got the world at their feet — an apartment full of video games, porn magazines, Coca Cola and a pizza on the way.

But then their slightly older neighbor Rita (Danny Perea) asks if she can bake herself a cake in their oven (for poignant reasons we learn about later on), and the pizza delivery man (Enrique Arreola), who's something of a character, refuses to leave until he's been paid — one of the boys having insisted it took him longer than the allotted time to get the pizza to them.

More themes emerge: a few coming-of-age rites of passage, like some experimental kissing in the kitchen, a bit of prepubescent "Brokeback Mountain" sexual tension and sad stories of unhappy parents and dislocated families. Studying the family album, everyone wonders why no one in Flama's family has red hair except him. Then, in the kind of off-handed cruelty kids enjoy, they note, oh, look, the waiter in his parents' honeymoon picture has red hair! Later, the pizza man relates a particularly distressing — needlessly so — tale of his former job at a city pound, where he chose which dogs to put to death.

Shot in black and white and set in a fittingly anonymous apartment building, the film's understatement at times achieves a kind of formal elegance. And occasionally, the dead air seems daring, rather than empty. But neither of those pluses entirely counter-balances the minuses of often dull dialogue and marginally interesting characters.

The title refers to a kitschy painting of ducks won in a raffle and ignored for years, but now the subject of a bitter custody quarrel between Flama's divorcing parents. A nicely unexpected touch of magic realism also underscores the picture's symbolic importance.

Everything's not always going to be ducky, "Duck Season" says. In fact, adolescence is probably going to feel like one long open season. So treasure those afternoons when life hands you a few epiphanies and asks so little from you in return.