This monochrome Mexican movie came highly recommended to me, and without doubt it does have, amidst all its idiosyncrasies, quite a few endearing qualities. It's this residual appeal that stops you declaring "me vale un pito" at the end. The experience is stimulating on many levels, if not really complete as a story. This is really the sort of charming, semi-consequential film I would normally expect to turn up at festival time, not on general release at the ODEON.
It's a comedy, but I didn't catch the sound of laughter anywhere else in the darkness around me. I did manage a chuckle or two myself, but the comedy is like much else in Duck Season, the sense of the extraordinary and notable, catchy dialogue, memorable incidents etc - spasmodic and oddly superficial. There's no doubt an argument that this is the very nature of the world that Moko and Flama inhabit, but that doesn't mean that every film about banality has to be banal itself.
Ultimately I felt that writer-director Fernando Eimbcke had failed to convince me that the events that I had just witnessed had, or could have, taken place in precisely this way anywhere else other than in his imagination. And when you have four central protagonists it is important that the audience should be equally confident about the goals and motivations, of the basic reality of each one of them. Again, I don't think he quite pulled this off.
It's clear that Eimbcke is fond of the well set-up shot. This highly composed nature of each scene is one of the reasons this was produced as a film and not as a TV drama. The other obvious one is that much of the audience would reach for their remotes at the first commercial break. Trapped in the darkened cinema, the memory of having paid still fresh, you have more incentive to persevere. And perseverence is ultimately rewarded. For the three males at least something important has changed for them by the end of that quirky Sunday.
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