Beyond the Multiplex

Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño) are best friends, stuck in that awkward mid-teen phase between kidhood and pseudo-grown-up. (They're 14, but as we're all painfully aware, that phase can kick in anywhere from 12 up to 16 or so.) They're doing what they always do on Sunday afternoon, hanging out in Flama's parents' apartment -- in a faceless lower-middle high-rise in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City -- playing video games, drinking Coke, ordering pizza. Nearly all the elements here are universal fragments of global culture; Eimbcke says the only thing distinctively Mexican about "Duck Season" is the slang Flama and Moko use in their half-improvised dialogue.

On one level, not much happens. A cute neighbor girl named Rita (Danny Perea) rings the doorbell; her oven's on the fritz and she needs to bake something. Flama and Moko ignore her, at first, but she never seems to get finished. The nerdy pizza guy, Ulises (Enrique Arreola), arrives 11 seconds late, according to Flama's stopwatch -- and Telepizza ("your friendly pizza") promises a free pie if your order takes more than half an hour! Flama and Moko won't pay him, and Ulises won't leave without his money.

But the electricity's cutting in and out, ruining Flama and Moko's video-game tournament and forcing these four, however grudgingly, to interact. Brownies are eventually baked and eaten, and some of Rita's hidden agenda is revealed. Ulises discusses his life's lost opportunities and his secret parakeet-breeding scheme. The mystical qualities of colored, M&M-like candies are explored. All become fascinated with an anodyne painting of ducks in a marsh over which Flama's divorcing parents are fighting, and which seems to become more and more realistic the longer they gaze into it. (Rita's brownies are possibly implicated.)

Eimbcke says his influences include John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club" and Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise," and that about sums up the irresistible combination of "Duck Season." As I say, not much happens, but also everything does. With Rita's help, Moko begins to explore his own sexual identity, a subject he seems to have been avoiding. Flama faces the fact that the family he has known all his life is imploding. Ulises reaches a crucial turning point in his life, through the portal of that duck painting, and Rita turns out to have a more specific grievance on this particular day than any of them.

"I was sure that even when nothing is happening, always something happens," says Eimbcke. (He has a translator along, but only relies on her for the occasional word or turn of phrase.) "I felt that it was a challenge to work on a story where nothing happens. That was the beginning idea behind this film."

He wanted to work with "a specific kind of emptiness," the kind found in teenage lives where the days seem simultaneously longer and more eventful than they do for adults. Or at least they do when the electricity goes out. "When the blackout happens, special things can happen," he observes. "If that blackout doesn't happen, then nothing special will happen. Special things could happen in the video game -- a big score or something. That's about it."

Eimbcke says he was always sure that this particular story had to be told in black-and-white. "Because it's very simple, it happens in one place and the conflicts of the characters are so subtle. I thought that black-and-white would help. It won't distract you from what's happening on the screen. I was also thinking of the film in terms of visual narrative and geometry. With black-and-white, in one apartment, we had the opportunity to play with volume and geometric forms. It gave a visual rhythm to the film, and I think it could be really boring in color."

Occasionally, the film does break out of the Tlatelolco apartment -- first for Ulises' troubled odyssey from the pizzeria (notice his name, please) and subsequently for a handful of increasingly surreal fantasy and memory sequences, which I won't spoil. "Duck Season" raises many questions about the identities and destinies of its characters, but don't expect the events of a single Sunday afternoon to answer many of those. Some viewers have seen the film's central subject as Moko's burgeoning (if largely hypothetical) sexuality, but that's just one question among many.

"This is a teenage boy who has both experiences," Eimbcke says -- that is, with a girl and with a boy -- "and questions himself about what he is feeling. The film is about questions, not answers. That's what a film must be, to me. Who am I to give an answer? A lot of people ask me, 'What happens with Moko? Is he gay?' And I tell them, 'I don't know. What do you think?'"

When he screened the film for an audience of Mexican teenagers, Eimbcke reports, some felt that Moko was definitely gay, but one brave girl got up to insist, "No! It's normal at that age to ask that question." Everybody laughed, he says, but no one contradicted her. "The point of this film, maybe, is everybody has their own questions, and their own answers."

"Duck Season" opens March 10 in New York and Los Angeles, with many other cities to follow.

Next page: What on earth is Winona Ryder doing with that puppet?