Set in a tiny apartment on the laziest Sunday imaginable, Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season, the first film from this talented Mexican director, was a cockeyed tribute to that ever-expanding force known as adolescence. Two kids, armed with to-the-rim glasses of Coke and a first-person-shooter, find themselves flummoxed by rolling electrical blackouts, a goofy pizza man who won't leave, and a lonely teen girl looking for a place to cook pot brownies for her birthday. Subtle in his comedic fits, Eimbcke augmented the straightforward thrust of the story through an elliptical editing scheme that intermittently revealed and hid the action with the same temperamental frequency as the blackouts that plagued his central protagonist.

In his second feature, the funny and moving Lake Tahoe, Eimbcke has moved the action outside, but that isn't to say that his focus has broadened or that his sense of tone has dulled. Beginning as a Keatonesque stroll through a neighborhood of auto-repair and auto-parts stores, Eimbcke's latest has an even less assuming sense of comedy to it but is far more consistent in its gags. This time out, Juan (Diego Cataño) crashes his car on the outskirts of his small Mexican hometown and spends the rest of the day trading and promising favors to get the needed parts to fix his busted Nissan. As well as wannabe Shaolin Monk David (Juan Carlos Lara II) and neglectful punk-rocker mother Lucia (Daniela Valentine), the angular teen finds himself indebted to an aging mechanic who needs his dog walked.

Son to a recently deceased baseball player, Juan and his brother Joaquin (Yemil Sefani) become ostensibly orphaned by a mother so enveloped in depression that she can barely find the will to get out of the bath or her bed. Progreso, the town where Eimbcke filmed, is constructed and filmed to look like a playground; Juan's front lawn is nothing so much as a sandbox for his younger brother. Without comfort or guidance, Juan's task is basically his first real responsibility since the death of his father: Fix the car! He is Ulises in Duck Season without the afforded luxury of arrested development, forced into manhood in one mighty heave of events.

A Jarmusch devotee, Eimbcke has less interest in the lonesome nature of Juan and rather finds a poignant humanity in how one, perhaps inescapably, depends on people in the most minor sequence of events. Though annoyed with David, Juan joins him to see Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon at the local cinema. He also takes responsibility by helping the aging mechanic find his beloved dog, who escapes while Juan is walking him. But he ultimately finds the purest comfort with Lucia, who sleeps with him after she finds out her rock concert was the previous day; it could be argued that she knew about the concert all along. Satisfied neither with puppy love nor ham-fisted sentimentalism, Eimbcke aborts the simple trajectory by the ends of both of his films but in Tahoe, the ending is far more fulfilling. As we get our first real glimpse at a picture of Juan and Joaquin's father, it feels as if Juan is seeing him in a brand new light: not as tragedy or model but rather as a fellow adult.



They come for the excellent skiing.