Lake Tahoe
Dir: Fernando Eimbcke
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Film Movement
89 Minutes
The camera never moves in Lake Tahoe; very few things do at any given point. Fernando Eimbcke's static camera captures the desolate stillness of the small town it shows us - we don't move through a vibrant world, we watch as people make slow progress through an impassive one. The images are deliberately geometric, all straight lines and right angles. The pace is extremely slow. It's a pretty familiar aesthetic at this point, an art house staple that always seems to be regarded as a breath of fresh air, but the fact is that each year sees at least a dozen movies like it. This one isn't particularly noteworthy.
Juan (Diego Cataño) crashes his car into a telephone pole outside of town, we don't know how or why, but he isn't fazed by it; he goes into town to try and get it fixed. The town is an embodiment of loneliness and all of its denizens seem equally longing. Over the course of the film Juan encounters various friendless mechanics - an old man, Don Heber (Hector Herrera), who lives a life of quiet torpor with his dog, and another, David (Juan Carlos Lara II), an aspiring Shao-lin monk whom he befriends.
The movie trades in "quirky," Napoleon Dynamite-esque (and I mean that in its worst sense) humor that is meant to turn it into a sort of sedate romp through a small town, but most of it falls flat; little deadpan baubles of studied eccentricity. What still comes through, in spite of this glut, is the characters' genuine senses of loneliness. The mechanic with the dog has Juan sit with him while he eats breakfast before tending to his problem. The aspiring monk wants to show him a video documentary on Shi Yan Ming, then takes as protracted a route as he can towards helping him with his problem. Eventually, when he realizes that he's not equipped to help, he has Juan stand on lookout while he steals the part from another car on the street. "See? I told you I'd do it!"
That all of this builds toward a Profound Moment of Catharsis seems almost unnecessary to say at this point, but the problem is that Juan doesn't have any hint of underlying tension in him. When we first get to visit his home, around the halfway point of the movie, the revelation at the end is all but directly stated. Even so, even though we already clearly know what is going to later be treated as a major emotional surprise, the facts don't transfer over to the character. He remains the same blank slate he was at the beginning, none of that inner anguish swims around below the surface. A flat figure set against a two-dimensional backdrop, moving from left to right, like in a newspaper comic strip. When he finally cries over it at all near the end, you could time it with a stopwatch, for better or for worse.
by Andrei Alupului