Review of Lake Tahoe (2008) by Alex F — 21 Apr 2009

[b]Lake Tahoe[/b], 2009, dir: Fernando Eimbecke ? 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.

This film 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, [i]Duck Season[/i]. 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 filmmaking, 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 [i]Lake Tahoe 2[/i]. [font=Wingdings]J[/font].

8/10.