The Dreamy Artisan Cinema of Lake Tahoe

LAKE TAHOE 

(Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico, 2008, 81 minutes)

"The director calls his style 'artisan cinema'; I just call it dreamy."-- Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times

 

It's a sunny day in the Yucatán as Fernando Eimbcke's film begins. A red Nissan whizzes by and then, after the screen fades to black, the sound of a crash rings out, after which the picture returns. For reasons unexplained, the teenaged driver has smashed the family car into a telegraph pole. Apparently unharmed, he sets out to seek help for the ailing automobile. 

As in Eimbcke's 2004 feature debut, Duck Season, cinematographer Alexis Zabé uses long, static shots to capture this prologue. Moments later, while Juan (Diego Cataño) waits for suspicious old coot Don Heber (Héctor Herrera) to assist him, Zabé shoots their figures from Yasujirō's Ozu's "tatami mat" level, rendering Heber's vertical figure headless. 

Once convinced Juan isn't trying to rob him, Heber slurps down a bowl of cereal, recommends a distributor harness, and then promptly falls asleep in his backyard hammock, leaving Juan to continue combing the empty streets for assistance. Finally he meets David (Juan Carlos Lara), a martial arts-obsessed mechanic who gives him a ride to the sedan on his bicycle. David offers to repair the damage for 300 pesos (approximately $25 USD), which Juan doesn't have, so the quest for help turns into a quest for money. 

As it turns out, the money is the easy part. Juan borrows the sum from a friend, but help continues to allude him and he can't reach his mother by telephone. The pastel port town of Progreso looks real, but ascribes to a sort of dream logic. Passive if persistent, Juan watches a video with David, then shares a meal with him and his evangelical mother. 

Eimbcke, who wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay with Paula Markovitch, cowriter of Duck Season and writer/director of The Prize, suggests that Juan needs the companionship of these lonely people as much as they need him. The difference is, they seem to know it, and he doesn't. 

Juan walks home, but his mother and younger brother are in no mood to talk, so he returns to town to pick up the missing part. Next thing he knows, he's watching Enter the Dragon with David, hanging out with Lucía (Daniela Valentine), the punk-rock singer and single mother who works with him at the auto parts store, and walking—then losing—Don Heber's beloved boxer. 

A skinny, sad-faced kid whose clothes hang from his frame, Juan knows how to say no, but not very forcefully. The reason for his demeanor gradually comes into relief, but Eimbcke drops some broad hints along the way. 

If the film works, and it does, it would work even better if those hints had been more subtle or had arrived closer to the end, but the way the filmmaker infuses a laconic comedy with loss and longing links Lake Tahoe with Duck Season, and serves as a nominal sequel since he cast the same leading man, and despite the move from B&W to color, urban to rural, interior to exterior. 

On the basis of his first film, among the best of 2006, I wouldn't have predicted that Eimbcke might one day recall Carlos Reygadas, except the distance between Lake Tahoe and Silent Light--Zabé also shot the Reygadas film--is surprisingly short, while a greater gap lies between him and the more genre-oriented Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, though he thanks the latter two in the credits. 

At this point in their careers, Eimbcke and Reygadas have the art house in their sights, but while it's hard to imagine Reygadas transitioning to American-style filmmaking, Eimbcke's interest in restless teenagers—notwithstanding Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También—predicts a career more like Kelly Reichardt or Gus Van Sant than other Mexican filmmakers. 

If Lake Tahoe isn't as funny as Duck Season, a low-income twist on Risky Business in which a bored teen makes the most of an unsupervised Sunday, it's a richer work. Though Eimbcke relies too much on Jim Jarmusch's fade-to-black device and though the sleepy pace has its longeurs, even at 81 minutes, he aptly reproduces the rhythms of small-town life where the seemingly minor episodes between major events and the seemingly random strangers who enter your life can attain mythic dimensions when the familiar can't—at least temporarily—offer the necessary support. 

Lake Tahoe continues at the Northwest Film Forum through July 30 at 7 and 9pm. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. For more information, please click here. Images from Harvard Film Archive (Daniela Valentine) and Rotten Tomatoes (Diego Cataño and Juan Carlos Lara and Cataño with Héctor Herrera's on-screen pooch).