A Mexican teenager's road from one crash to another
REVIEWS
Sunday July 05 2009
Cert 12A
In Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe, a 16-year-old boy Juan (Diego Catano) embarks on a painful journey of discovery when he crashes the family car into a pole on a desolate stretch of road in a small, quiet Mexican town.
It is in his quest to fix the red Nissan Sedan that he meets several endearing eccentrics: a poorly-conditioned, ageing car mechanic who treats his Boxer dog Sica almost as an equal, a self-assured, flirtatious punk-rock-loving single mum and a Bruce Lee-obsessed young boy, a similar age to Juan himself .
Juan's journey, which is documented over 24 hours, sees him stumble from one demoralising situation to another, all of which are compounded by the much heavier burden that awaits him at home, one that is really revealed only at the end of the film. The crashed car serves, in many ways, as a metaphor for Juan's immobilising grief.
This independently produced, low-budget Mexican film takes a considerable time to get started. The cast is relatively unknown, the dialogue is skeletal and the plot anything but meaty, however, the stunning static camera work and long-held shots succeed in doing much of the talking.
Lake Tahoe is only the second directing endeavour of Fernando Eimbcke, whose critically acclaimed debut Duck Season won several awards.
On the whole, the film is a very sweet, thought-provoking, and at times funny portrait of love, loss and youthful inexperience and the way in which unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances can force people to grow up quicker than they should.
Lake Tahoe is now showing at the Irish Film Institute, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Public Enemies
Cert 15A
In 1933, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) masterminds a jail escape and gets stuck straight back into his role as bank robber and Public Enemy Number One. Setting up in Chicago where he has bought safety, he alternates great plans with occasional jobs and glamorous socialising. He begins a romance with coat-check girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and this romance becomes his guiding light.
However, Dillinger's man-of-the-people role incenses J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) who sets up an entire unit of his fledgling FBI, under Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), to get Dillinger. And what ensues is a cat and mouse game of Thirties American law enforcement.
Public Enemies is good. But at 140 minutes it needed to be better. It looks great and there is some lovely attention to detail in the clothes, cars and sets. It has elements of homage to the gangster movies of its time, the kind of hammy bravado of Jimmy Cagney in Public Enemy and Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama, the movie Dillinger went to see before his showdown.
It's closely shot and the HD scenes do add something, but with director and co-writer Michael Mann's joylessness, it all makes for style over substance. There is little real emotional hook, and the story needed it because the reason Dillinger was so hard to catch was that he hung out amongst the people. The references to why he could are very few.
It's a film that tells but doesn't really show, so it's hard to get feeling from it. The script doesn't convey Dillinger's charisma, to do this they mostly rely on Johnny Depp being Johnny Depp. That is often enough, but without Depp the film wouldn't really hold together so well. Also, the romance with Frechette lacks chemistry, we're told of gang loyalty but not really shown it and the Purvis v Dillinger drive isn't as effective as it could be.
Overall, it's pretty and the performances are good. All the actors are eminently watchable but it drags a little and it could have been better.
Public Enemies is now showing nationwide
- Andrea Byrne, Aine O'Connor
