Lake Tahoe

The second film from Fernando ‘Duck Season’ Eimbcke retains the crew (including excellent cinematographer Alexis Zabe, now shooting in colour and widescreen), the star (Diego Cataño) and the droll, minimalist ambience and slow-burn emotionalism of his earlier film in the deceptively uneventful ‘story’ of a middle-class Yucatán young man’s day-long search for a spare part for his crashed car. Eimbcke’s is an amiable, discreet and original talent, not to every go-getter’s taste – but the drowsy affection he shows in his often startling images of small-town life can evince a similar ‘revelatory in the banal’ approach to that of the Iranians.

And his naturalistic performances preserve the kooky attentiveness exemplified by some of the best American indies. Allowing for moments of gentle contrivance, ‘Lake Tahoe’ makes for a quietly seductive entertainment, progressively engrossing, funny and communicative, the whole enterprise graced with a humanism so sweetly positive and pure it threatens to shade into Zen acceptance.