Temporada de Patos (Duck Season)
A day in my childhood that I remember very clearly I would not, at the time, have called childhood, not at all. I had my bicycle at school, and found myself with three friends. One was a boy who could not leave soon enough. The other two were girls. One of the girls had a crush on me, and I had a crush on the other. In a patch of grass by a small bridge over a drainage pipe, they covered me in purple flowers and we recognized to each other, in so many words, the futility of our situation. We hid in the first girl's bedroom as the day turned dark, whispers straining to become innuendos. At last I drove home to find an angry father. "Did you ever have one of those days..." I began in my defense. It didn't work.
In the apartment where Duck Season is set, the passage of time is as undependable as the electricity, which cuts out in the middle of a couple of video games, handing the day over to magic and love.
"Quince minutos, nada mas." Fifteen minutes, no more, says Rita as she arrives towards the beginning of the movie, complicating and catalyzing the two boys' time outside time. If the apartment is an Edenic space, she plays both Eve and serpent with neither blame nor expulsion. "Fifteen minutes" means nothing, of course, as sex and drugs flow from her presence and weave into the day, free from the cumbersome conventions of moralizing. Instead of wringing melodrama from the conflicts of the characters, the conflict arises from time against timelessness. The arrival of a pizza delivery boy in his twenties (significantly named Ulises as T. reminded me) allows the boys to stage a fight over paying for the food, but serves really to introduce a theme of disappointment and the threat of the passage of time. "El asunto es ver quien se chinga a quien", the issue is who fucks over who, says Flama, gazing into the painting of ducks over which his parents have chosen to stage a custody proxy battle.
The structural challenge of the movie is keeping the gang of four together. The kids have nowhere else to go, and affection for each other, but how on earth does the pizza delivery boy justify staying in the apartment when he so clearly needs his job? The movie has a sufficient number of gambits to keep him put, but the answer is this: he is no less subject to the magic of a timeless day than the children. My straining suspension of disbelief betrays my father's No in me, and tells me where my childhood ends.
posted by Josh K-sky at
3:04 AM
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