Lake Tahoe (2008) Reviews

• Lake Tahoe (2008 movie, unrated)

  Rizar2010-11-03

  "Lake Tahoe" is a wonderful, placid drama about a boy's strange encounters as he, externally, seeks help to fix his car, but, more to the point, as he internally seeks something (to escape, to cope, to get reassurance) after the death of his father. He seems willing to befriend the people he meets as long as he chooses the terms himself, and as long as performing favors or going out with friends gets him away from home or anything that would tie him to his town. Don't expect action in this little personal odyssey (taking place over the course of a single day). The viewer gets a chance to focus as intensely on the day's weird experiences as Juan (a teenager experiencing his father's death) does. Even if only for as long as Juan searches for answers. Fernando Eimbcke's film is shot and takes place in Puerto Progreso, Yucatán (Mexico), a mostly vacant, small town. Juan (Diego Cataño) meets a couple auto mechanics and a clueless auto receptionist, and checks in with his little brother and his grieving mother (she's locked herself in a bathroom for much of the movie). The viewers mainly see him walk across the screen for several long shots, some of which recur as he retreads his path this way and that way. Nearly every scene is shot with motionless camera angles, a huge difference from many movies in which the camera constantly moves, zooms, or shakes to the point of nausea. The effect of this odd camera work is to make the whole background become part of the film. Patient viewers may get absorbed in the movie, especially as all the individual shots start adding up to a meaningful story. Most of the eventful action takes place off camera, during frequent cut to blacks (sometimes with important sounds in the background, plain natural-musical sounds, or silence). The film has a sense of immersion and simplicity in which the viewer fills the missing fragments with sound or their imagination. We aren't given much information about where he wants to go or where he was going when he crashed his family's car into a pole (on the side of a low traffic road). How did he crash it in such a seemingly straight and hazard-less area? The point is probably that Juan is just as uncertain as the viewer. He has no ready explanation for the car crash, but perhaps he was trying to get away or somehow escape his intense feelings after his loss. We only learn about any of these feelings until a good way into the movie. He seems mostly passive at first, just taking in the oddly tangential actions of the people he meets, but he intermittently prods them to hurry. Juan seems stuck between a desire to get out of these places he visits (to always find another auto mechanic) and a strange fixation on experiencing the little quirks of the people he meets. His motive to get away usually wins. Juan often says "no" or shakes his head in the negative to requests. Juan meets an elderly auto mechanic, Don Heber (played by Hector Herrera), who makes the boy wait as he eats breakfast with his dog, Sica. He goes on to the next person after Don fails to help him fix his car. Juan waits even longer for a young mechanic, David (Juan Carlos Lara II), an energetic follower of martial arts who is apt to break into a series of kicks and arm movements (turning martial arts moves into a sort of dance) and Bruce Lee reenactments. As he hangs out with Lucia (Daniela Valentine), the receptionist at David's auto shop, she starts to trust him and asks him to babysit her infant while she goes to a concert. He declines several times. Many such encounters play out. David's mother wants him to comment on a passage from the Bible (he sneaks out of the house), Don wants him to walk his dog (Juan accepts only very reluctantly, loses the dog, and then childishly goes on to the next auto mechanic), and David wants him to go to a Bruce Lee movie (he declines at first). He only accepts any of these offers after he has time to think them over and make his own choice, or perhaps only after he gets home and finds he wants to get away again (perhaps it has to do with the place reminding him of his father). And then these requests for favors and friendship suddenly become the perfect thing to go do. An excellent, climactic scene takes place between Jaun and Lucia after she isn't able to go to a concert. Jaun doesn't need to stay on as a babysitter and seems intent to leave, but, again, he seems needy at the same time. Lucia takes advantage of his indecision with a sexual advance (they take off their shirts), but he uses it as a cathartic chance for release and ends up crying on her. Probably not what she had in mind, but a very well done scene in minimal, natural light. The rest of the film is also shot with just natural lighting. Juan is an interesting case study in loss (partly autobiographical by the director) in that it leaves Juan's motives mysterious for the viewer to figure out. Juan tries to escape from everything that holds him in place. But he overcomes such desires in a rush of emotional release. The film leaves me with the feeling that the journey was much more interesting than any likely consequence to it. The post emotional release period sort of kills all the meaningful possibilities and mysterious encounters that took place for most of the film.

• Showing it all

  kosmasp2008-08-04

  I watched this movie at the Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival) earlier this year and the movie struck a chord with me. Not the theme/story of the movie, but the way it was filmed and (dare I say?) edited. For some the word edited might be as far a stretch as to call this movie fast moving. It'll even be an understatement to say it's slow moving, so be warned! The shots are long (watching a character moving from the left screen edge to the right screen edge and beyond might be tough for some viewers. But after the initial resent at the beginning of the movie and if you can let yourself indulge the tranquility of the film, you might enjoy it! Just don't expect anything fancy or anything major revealing (plot twists etc.) and you'll have a nice, quiet and pleasant viewing. While it dares to be different (as some other movies, that I have voted in a more bad way), this does not only promise us something, but it delivers.

• Loss and recovery

  Ali_John_Catterall2009-06-22

  The real star of this elliptical neo-realist drama isn't its leading teen Diego Cataño, who plays Juan - or even the very watchable Juan Carlos Lara II, who plays David, the charismatic mechanic and martial arts nut Juan meets on the road. Instead, it's the film's sole location: Chicxulub, near Progreso, Yucatan - a woozy coastal town with distinctive architecture and huge horizons, which the film, utilising natural light throughout, describes in exquisite and near-static wide-shots. Here and there, lush vegetation sprouts from the urban façade, while low, flat-roofed buildings render the azure, cloudless Mexican sky even more expansive. Appearances can be deceptive, however, and although it isn't mentioned in the film, this corner of the world isn't quite as sleepy as it seems. Progreso is blighted by tropical hurricanes, while Chicxulub is one of the most important places in the Earth's history. Sixty-five million years ago a meteorite smacked into the spot causing tidal waves, volcanoes to blow and the lights to be snuffed out - which scientists believe doomed the dinosaurs to extinction. Death, loss and upheaval is also at the heart of Lake Tahoe, a film whose apparent stillness conceals roiling turmoil and monumental change. What follows is so outwardly minimalist that to relay the plot in its entirety would result in a description as prosaic as a 'Sight & Sound' synopsis. Sixteen-year-old Juan wraps the family's Nissan Tsuru round a post, whether deliberately or accidentally. While wandering through town for help, he encounters some locals (actors sourced from the region), including the elderly Don Heber (Hector Herrera) whose dog Juan later loses while taking it for walkies; kung-fu fan David, who takes him to the pictures to watch 'Enter The Dragon'; and single-parent shopgirl Lucia (Daniela Valentine) who asks him to babysit for her. All the while, Juan circles the homestead, occasionally dropping by, but more often avoiding it. The fridge has packed up, his mother (Mariana Elizondo) has locked herself in the bathroom with a cigarette and her sorrows ("Yes, I'm fine - now get the hell out"), leaving the house to go to pot and Juan's little brother Joaquin (Yemil Sefani) to fend for himself. "What's 'condolences'?" asks Joaquin. "People have been calling all day, and when I answer, everyone says... accept their condolences." About halfway through, this previously cryptic affair starts making sense. Juan's father has recently died. And nobody's coping. This feels like autobiography, and director Fernando Eimbcke has confirmed that is the case. Juan is transparently in denial, the 'first stage of grief', as identified by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Lake Tahoe's detached, narcoleptic air echoes the emotional numbness the teenager is experiencing in the immediate aftermath of his father's sudden death. Further implying a frazzled state of mind, the direction deliberately disorientates us in subtle (and some none too subtle) ways: repeatedly shooting Cataño walking from the right-hand side of the frame to the left immediately 'wrong-foots' the viewer, more used to left-right progressions. Juan, we feel, isn't making progress. Meanwhile, the film's frequent and extended blackouts, borrowed from Jim Jarmusch's 'Stranger Than Paradise', serve not only as indicators of condensed time, but also suggest psychic pit-stops in which a truckload of teeming and conflicted emotions must pause and regroup before surging on. More worryingly, they may also represent severe psychological shutdown: after all, it is during Lake Tahoe's first blackout that we hear, with a wrenching of metal and a tinkling of glass, the instantly recognisable sound of an automobile crunching headlong into a post. The boy has literally and metaphorically taken his hands off the driving wheel. Yet, in the midst of death, life goes on. Juan's gently amusing and cathartic encounters with the townsfolk remind him and us that there's a world to live for just beyond our doorstep, filled with love, happiness, tragedy, and, yes, absurdity. During his mini-odyssey, Juan learns how others deal with loss, whether by immersing themselves in the scriptures like David's mother (Olda López), or with wise, if weary resignation - Don Heber orders Juan to drive on after they discover his missing dog Sica has faithlessly adopted a new family. "Drive," he says, although there are tears in his eyes. "We need emotional content," David reminds Juan, quoting his hero Bruce Lee; the spur for him to resume the healing process. And which initially means thrashing the jenny out of the Nissan with a baseball bat. Anger, at least, is an advance on denial - and two steps closer to acceptance in the five step Kübler-Ross model. Later, he and Joaquin will symbolically peel off the car's naff 'Greetings From Lake Tahoe' bumper sticker - the one their aunt Maria brought back from her vacation, but that dad always hated. There won't be any more family holidays in any case. To say Lake Tahoe won't be to everybody's tastes is to understate the case. Eimbcke's self-described "road movie without a car" may even drive some audiences to the kind of seat-ripping behaviour not seen since the era of the Teddy boys. The language of Latin American cinema often seems beamed in from another planet entirely, with a style quite distinct from much of Western film-making. As with the director's similarly economical, calm and leisurely 'Duck Season', this is a slow, very, very slow and near-plot less drama, that may alienate many audiences on first showing, but definitely reward repeat viewings.

• Slow sleepy summer day

  SnoopyStyle2014-06-19

  Teen Juan (Diego Cataño) crashes the family car into a pole. He searches the quiet streets for help to fix the car. He encounters paranoid mechanic Don Heber and his dog. Then there is young mother Lucia. And there is David the young mechanic who is obsessed with kung fu. This is extremely slow and minimalist. It is a Mexican indie. It's visually bright like a sleepy summer day. I'm fine with some long artistic shots but this has way too much of them. The movie is only an hour and a half. It feels like half of it has nothing in it. The other half has very quiet acting going on which doesn't showcase any big acting skills. It is an art film to be sure. I just never felt any excitement for this movie even when the backstory is revealed.

• A universal exploration of loss

  howard.schumann2010-01-24

  In Fernando Eimbcke's minimalist Lake Tahoe, family members shut off emotional expression to avoid coming to grips with a devastating loss. Teenager Juan (Diego Catano) wraps his Nissan car around a pole, then spends most of the film reaching out to others to help him fix his car, masking his need for emotional connection; Joaquin (Yemil Sefani), the younger sibling hides in a tent while the boys' mother (Mariana Elizondo) remains for long hours in the bathtub without communicating. It is only late in the film that we find out the reason for this emotional turmoil. Nominated for the Golden Bear Award and winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival as well as several honors at the Mexican Academy Awards, Lake Tahoe is set in Chicxulub, near Progreso, Yucatan, the area where a devastating asteroid was alleged to have hit the earth 65 million years ago. Shot with mostly wide-angle static shots and filled with natural light, Lake Tahoe captures the lazy mood of a town with its vast empty spaces, sparse vegetation, and low flat-roofed buildings. The film takes its name from a bumper sticker on the family car from an Aunt who visited the famous California resort some years ago and whose meaning is revealed later in the film. The film is quiet and moves very slowly with an undercurrent of sadness, though it is not without tension and its arc is unpredictable. Interrupted periodically with blank screens (reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger in Paradise), the dark screens seemingly provide the characters with time to pause and reflect. After Juan crashes his red Nissan, he spends most of the day trying to find a part to get the car running again and, in the process, must deal with a variety of eccentric townspeople. His first contact, the elderly Don Heber (Hector Herrera), a retired mechanic, hasn't seen the car but confidently tells him he needs a new distributor harness. Heber takes his time, telling Juan to look for the part himself as he takes care of his dog Sica, feeding him breakfast from the kitchen table while the bewildered Juan looks on unamused. Juan also must contend with Lucia (Daniela Valentine), a clerk at an auto repair shop as they wait together silently for hours for Lucia's colleague, David (Juan Carlos Lara II) to show up. Lucia is a single mother, perhaps only a few years older than Juan, who must care for an infant boy that Juan seems to know how to get to go to sleep. Lucia wants him to listen to her music and tries to get him to babysit her small child but Juan almost always says no before agreeing to anything. David turns out to be a Kung Fu expert and a devotee of the martial arts and a source of comic relief throughout the film. He invites Juan to the cinema to see "Enter the Dragon", a martial arts movie and then tries to engage him in a kicking contest while Juan stands there passively until David shouts at him in true Bruce Lee tones that he needs emotional content, not anger. When Juan goes home, he finds his little brother Joaquin playing in a tent in the yard while his mother hides in the bathtub, telling everyone to leave her alone. "What's 'condolences'?" Joaquin asks his older brother. He says that "people have been calling all day, and when I answer, everyone says... accept their condolences." Though only 81 minutes long, Lake Tahoe feels organic and not written, capturing the real emotions of people who seem unable to communicate their grief. One telling scene is when Lucia and Juan fall into each other's arms and Juan begins to cry, the only emotion he has shown throughout the film, other than hitting his car with a baseball bat. Diego Catana is excellent as Juan who appears in every scene and carries the film with an honest and effortless performance. Like Broken Wings, an Israeli film from 2002 with a similar theme, Lake Tahoe transcends the limitations of time and place to become a universal exploration of loss and how people respond to it. In Eimbcke's skillful hands, its sadness is relieved by the strength and dignity of its characters and balanced with a dry, deadpan humor that would be the envy of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki.