Duck Season 2004

Ostensibly uneventful but subtly momentous, Duck Season teases laid-back comedy out of the spectacle of two 14-year-old boys, friends, killing a day together in a housing estate apartment. Fernando Eimbcke’s oblique and tender take on underage swagger and inchoate desire is reminiscent of Raising Victor Vargas and Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night. (And like the latter, it’s elegantly shot in black and white and cut together with spry wit.) As the afternoon progresses, young Flama and Moko fall into a familiar routine of being young and restless together, playing video games, quaffing soda, listening to music and griping about their parents: Moko’s are separating, an unseemly business characterised by their son as a wrangle over the eponymous tacky painting of a flight of ducks. Their routine is disrupted by a take-out delivery man who refuses to leave until he is paid for the pizzas the boys claim arrived seconds too late. Then an older girl from next door commandeers the kitchen to make a cake, proposes sex and drugs – and wreaks sweet havoc. Amongst its many pleasures Duck Season finds stoned rapture in Beethoven – and ends with a perfect post –credits gag that has you leaving the cinema grinning about events yet to befall its thoroughly beguiling characters. — BG