Lake Tahoe 2007

Anyone who savoured the tender deadpan comedy of Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season in 2004 will have some idea of the pleasures awaiting in his second feature. Selected as the "Revelation of the Year" at the Cannes Critics' Week 2008, the film follows 16-year-old Juan who inexplicably crashes the family car, and then wanders the streets of a dead-end industrial seaside town in Yucatán trying to organise a repair job. His encounters with various erratic and marginally helpful individuals in the auto repair business are observed with much amusement. Eimbcke is particularly gifted at catching the drift of what his characters are not saying. Affectionate but intently unsentimental, this apparently inconsequential day-in-the-life gets deeper and richer as it goes. — BG. "Eimbcke is a master of tone, moving deftly from funny-profound scenes of teen neo-realism to others that are pure slapstick." — Lee Marshall, Screendaily