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.
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