This morning Juan (Diego Cataño) has crashed the family car into a pole just outside the village where he lives, and cannot get the vehicle started again. This means he has to traipse around the garages to find someone who will help him out, but the first one he arrives at is closed, or so the mechanic sitting inside tells him anyway. He wanders along to another one, finds its gates open and tentatively enters, calling for assistance, but the owner thinks he is a burglar and uses his guard dog to make sure Juan doesn't go anywhere. A simple misunderstanding, but there will not be much simple about today...
Lake Tahoe was Fernando Eimbcke's follow up to his acclaimed Duck Season, although it was often judged a lesser work. It's a very gently paced film, to the point that the less serene viewer might be filled with a need to reach into the screen and give the characters a shake for much of the running time, but there is a reason for their apparent lack of direction. Although we are not aware of it for quite a while, Juan has suffered a tragedy which explains why his mind was not on his driving, and indeed why he might have crashed the car deliberately. Not everyone has that excuse, and for many of them that dreaded word quirky could well apply.
The first man Juan gets to know is that one who thought he was a burglar, Don Heber (Hector Herrera), but after he has had his breakfast, a scene which feels like it goes on for ten minutes even if it does not, he advises the boy to see what the part of the engine that needs replacing is. This he does, but when he gets back the old man is fast asleep in a hammock, so Juan is forced to resume his trek, though at least he now has an idea of what is wrong with the car. There's a sense of one step forward, two steps back to the drama as every time the teenager makes progress in his quest, the people he meets confound him by being obstacles.
Take the next people he meets, Lucia (Daniela Valentine), a girl behind the counter of a parts shop who tells him to wait so the mechanic who knows what he's talking about returns, and that mechanic, David (Juan Carlos Lara II) who eventually turns up what seems like hours later. What Lucia wants is for Juan to babysit her infant son so she may go to a concert that night, so she seems selfish, though not obnoxiously so as nobody in this is a villain. What David wants is a friend to talk about Bruce Lee with, to the extent that he invites Juan to a cinema trip to watch Enter the Dragon with him, but Juan appears to have more on his mind than old martial arts movies.
What that is is tenderly revealed, so that under that tranquil exterior of nothing much happening there is an undercurrent of sadness where the characters wish to make connections with each other, but are only dimly aware of how to be successful in this. Juan already had a strong connection in his life, but that has now been taken away, though his frustrations which ended up with him crashing has funnily enough provided him with the emotional associations that he really needed to move on. His paths cross with these people a few times, and you could almost believe that they are practically the sole inhabitants of the village so quiet does it appear, so if you have not been turned off by the lack of action then Lake Tahoe does have its charms. It's just so low-key that you half expect one of those static camera shots will last forever as the filmmakers leave it that bit too long and drift away.
