User Reviews

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.

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.

I saw this film at the 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival. It was by far my favorite out of the 10 I attended.

I'm surprised, reading the comments here, by the number of people who had problems with the black frames. It seems they are serving a very specific purpose that really moved me.

The devise doesn't happen by accident. But critics think this is some clumsy style element. I think those critics are lazy viewers. Watch it again. If you want "The Fast and the Furious" you can have your mom drop you off at the multiplex.

(I'm adding this final line because this format requires 10 lines of text.)

'Lake Tahoe' is a work of inspired minimalism formally laid out in luminous long shots--long and thin, because of a wide aspect ratio--and cut into segments with blackouts as in early Jim Jarmusch. As in Eimbcke's 2004 first film, 'Duck Season,' the protagonist is a teenage boy, whose meandering day seems a combination of Kafkaesque delays and the mañana spirit but gradually reveals a sense of dislocation due to personal loss. Someone important has died in his family. His mother (Mariana Elizondo) is smoking and weeping in the bathtub, and later lies asleep. His little brother Joaquin (Yemil Sefani) sits in a little tent in the backyard clipping football photos and later crouches in a bedroom closet.

But the morning begins for Juan ('Duck Season's' Diego Cataño) not at home but wandering on the road. He crashes the family's little old red Nissan into a tree (we just hear the crash in a blackout between static shots and then see the car and the tree). Juan is unharmed but the car won't start. A droll series of frustrations follows as he goes around on foot trying to get help at one garage after another. Juan needs a mechanic and instead people want his help and his friendship. These include an old man, a scrawny Bruce Lee fanatic who takes Juan back and forth to his Nissan on a rickety old bike, and a young woman with a small baby that stops crying and begins to coo whenever Juan holds it.

Eimbcke makes good use of the stillness of his young actor and of the camera. The old garage owner, Don Heber (Hector Herrera) takes Juan for a thief and has his dog, Sika, keep guard while he searches first for the phone then for the phone book to call the police. But the phone is dead, and before long Don Heber is sitting down to a cereal breakfast with Juan. When Juan declines ("I've had breakfast") Don Heber says "Sika!" and the dog jumps up on the table and eagerly consumes Juan's bowl of cereal. Don Heber decides without seeing the car what part is broken (the distributor harness) and tells Juan to look for it in his garage, then falls asleep in a hammock.

David (Juan Carlos Lara II), who's about the same age as Juan, boasts of his prowess as a mechanic, but disappears for long periods. While waiting for him in the doorway of a parts shop Juan gets to know Lucia (Daniela Valentine). He's also sidetracked to a meal at David's. While David is a fanatic of martial arts and invites Juan to a Kung Fu movie that evening, David's mother tries to convert Juan to her born-again Christianity.

It's Juan's deadpan manner and the deliberately ineloquent camera that help make the various incidents droll and somehow touching. Lucia wants something of Juan too: for him to babysit her baby, Fidel (Joshua Habid) so she can go to a concert.

Every shot seems to fall into the spaces defined by a quiet maze of low white buildings, graffiti and sunlight, as if all the locations in the little town were scattered in a small circle. Each image is beautifully composed and shot by cinematographer Alexis Zabe: even the shots of Juan driving the car, shot from outside the windshield, happen in lovely sun-kissed shadow. As he wanders around Juan passes by his modest family house, which is cozy and interesting inside, but full of emptiness. It's these touch-downs at "home" that show Juan's life has broken free of its moorings. It's emotional confusion as much as the day's circumstances that explains how Juan's come to be adrift in time. And yet he both retains a sense of purpose (and gets David to fix the car) and still has time to connect further with Don Heber, David, and Lucia, returning after a magical night away to fix hotcakes for Joaquin and add one significant touch from the front bumper of the now-revived car to complete Joaquin's scrapbook of their lost family member.

'Lake Tahoe' is only 81 minutes long and is a marvel in its use of limited means to charm, to create a unique (yet familiar and believable) world and to develop character and touch us with few words and few gestures. Though the blackouts may remind one of Jarmusch's 'Stranger Than Paradise,' Eimbcke carries them further, making them last longer and stand for the passage of time and also enriching them by continuing the sound track over the blackness, notably and drolly the screams and screeches of Kung Fu masters as Juan watches the Shaolin classic in a darkened cinema with David. The blackouts symbolize stoppage but also show Juan's life leaping forward even as he sits stymied.

Shown in February 2009 at the Walter Reade Theater of Lincoln Center, NYC, as part of the FSLC 'Film Comment' Selects series. Shown at numerous festivals with several awards and nominations.

The film Lake Tahoe acts as a very good lesson in no-budget film-making, but it also demonstrates that if your cinematic style does not jibe with your subject matter, it doesn't matter how frugally you make the film, it simply won't work.

The film begins with Juan (Diego Catano), a Mexican teenager accidentally running his car into a street post. After this, he can't get the car started so he embarks on a slow, and I mean slow visit to every auto parts shop in the nearby area. This journey is filmed in very long takes with NO camera movement (except for a handful of shots, presumably filmed on the day the filmmakers either borrowed or rented a dolly).

The set-ups are maddeningly repetitious. We will usually have a long shot of a garage or auto shop from across the street. Juan will walk into the frame (usually from the right to the left) and he will either stop at the store and ask about spare parts or he will just continue through the frame and out of sight.

At this point, we will usually cut to black and this black will either be a silent or it will contain some sound effect like a car crash or a dog barking, but mostly, the black frames are silent.

Now, this happens again and again in Lake Tahoe and while I tried to empty my mind of ordinary film technique, I couldn't help asking myself if these cuts to black were an attempt to compress time or were a way to show that our hero has walked a long distance.

Certainly, if the director didn't cut to black between shots and had simply continued with the long shots of Juan walking cut together in continuity, I would have gotten a sense of space and location, but by depriving us of this continuity of locale and not being clear about time compression, I was left wondering just what the hell was I watching.

Ultimately, we learn that Juan's father has died, presumably very recently and that he, along with his mother and younger brother are trying to deal with their grief, but they don't seem to be doing it very well.

Mom simply sits in the bathtub chain smoking and crying. Little brother hides in his tent in the front yard or in the closet in the room he shares with his brother. Meanwhile, Juan keeps looking for a distributor harness so he can get his car repaired, but considering he makes several visits during the course of the day to his house, he must not have crashed very far away in the first place, but then again, without any indication of time or locale, I don't know this for sure.

The rest of the film follows Juan as he deals with a variety of eccentric local people, but presumably, these people are his neighbors so I am at a loss to explain why he doesn't know them.

Juan meets an old man at a garage who asks him to walk his dog, named Sica, which the boy promptly loses. He meets a girl in a spare parts store who asks him to baby sit for her while she goes to a concert. He also meets another teenager named David (Juan Carlos Lara), about the same age as Juan who is a mechanical whiz and he manages to get Juan's car started again.

David also invites Juan to see the film Enter The Dragon later that night when it plays in a local movie house. The upshot of the whole movie comes when Juan finally gets his damaged car home and he peels off a bumper sticker that say LAKE TAHOE on it which he was apparently given as a gift from his deceased father. Cut to the credits.

Now, all of these long shots and black outs are deliberate choices made by director Fernando Eimbcke and I haven't the faintest idea what he is trying to say about grief by using this technique. Now, other directors have used long static shots followed by blackouts, most notably Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, but here the style is just plain annoying and pretentiously quirky.

If you are going to eschew conventional film-making techniques, that is perfectly fine, but have a point for doing it. What is the director trying to communicate on a formal level with this heavy, deadpan style that could not be communicated with regular style? This doesn't make Lake Tahoe stand out, it just makes it tedious.

Furthermore, it seems like the actors were all told to deliberately tone down anything like emotion in their performances. The only character who comes to anything resembling life is David, the boy mechanical genius and that's because he happens to love the martial arts and is forever practicing his high kicks when he gets a chance. It's not much to build a character on, but Juan Carlos Lara is the only person in this film with a personality.

By the end of the film, I was even more perplexed than I was at the start and I am still wondering what Lake Tahoe has to do with anything. As a film lover, I know that Lake Tahoe was where Michael Corleone had his brother Fredo executed in The Godfather Part II and that the entire story for the great thriller The Deep End took place there, but what this fresh water lake in Nevada has to do with anything else in this film is too obscure for me to comprehend.

This was a touching film about a young teenager named Juan who crashes his car, and spends the rest of the day wandering around his town trying to get it fixed. As the film progresses, we meet an old man and his dog, a chain-smoking teenage girl with an infant son, and a kung fu-obsessed youth who quotes Bruce Lee. We also meet Juan's brother Joaquin, and his mother (who sits in the bathtub smoking, we never see her face). We also find out that Juan is just getting over the loss of his father, which opens up the internal struggle that Juan is dealing with over the course of the film.

I saw this film at the Philadelphia Film Festival this year, and I enjoyed it immensely. It really benefits from having only a few characters, one setting, and having the story take place in one day. I wish more filmmakers would take this simplistic approach. Eimbecke really does a great job of telling the story, using the conflict of the broken car to move Juan from place to place, and giving the audience a little more information in each scene. The cinematography of this film was also beautifully simplistic, with very little camera movement, which reminded me of Eimbecke's other film, Duck Season. Eimbecke uses lots of black in this film. During certain scenes, there would be a few seconds of black so the audience could hear what was going on, but not see. I liked this, because Eimbecke is playing with the "rules" of film-making, so to speak. Overall, the film was very touching and I really loved the characters of Juan, David, and Lucia and the way they interacted. The film ended kind of abruptly, and left me wanting more. Actually, I just wanted to know if the old man ever got his dog back, but I guess I'll have to wait for Lake Tahoe 2.

8/10