Something is going on

FORGET grown-ups, cupcakes and Narnia -- here’s your real lazy Sunday. Two teenage boys, left alone in a Mexico City apartment, plan to spend the day playing video games, drinking soda and eating chips. A neighbor girl comes by to use the oven for some baking. Then the power goes out. The boys take more notice of the girl. They order a pizza.

Though the plot may be skeletal, a lot happens in “Temporada de Patos” (“Duck Season”), the debut feature by Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke, 35. Shot in a series of long takes by the steady gaze of a fixed camera, the film bursts with life as the characters move about the room and all around the corners of the frame. The deadpan humor and low-key performances are reminiscent of the early films of Jim Jarmusch, a debt Eimbcke makes explicit by thanking his predecessor in the end credits along with another master of cinematic stillness, Yasujiro Ozu.

For a project that’s been described as a film in which nothing happens, it seems packed with ideas about the big issues: what brings people together, what bonds them and what makes their lives meaningful.

But a black-and-white foreign film with no stars and a first time-director was few distributors’ idea of a movie that would fill seats in multiplexes across the country. So it’s taken “Duck Season,” which was shot in 2003 and premiered to numerous awards at the Guadalajara Mexican Film Festival in 2004, until now to find its way to U.S. theaters.

In the interim, the film played at Cannes, Toronto and the prestigious New Directors/New Films series in New York, picked up a Grand Jury Prize at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles and won prizes at numerous other festivals. In March 2005, it garnered 11 awards at the Ariels, Mexico’s Oscars, including best picture, best director, best screenplay, best actor and best actress. It was nominated this year for an Independent Spirit Award as best foreign film.

Though it found distributors in 34 other countries, it couldn’t crack the U.S. marketplace for foreign-language films until Alfonso Cuaron, veteran director of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and, perhaps most important, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” stepped in. His work on the Warner Brothers-based “Potter” franchise allowed him to make a match between “Duck Season” and Warner Independent Pictures, which released it Friday in Los Angeles and New York, with additional dates around the country to follow.

Cuaron first saw the film at Cannes, which he was attending with two films he produced. He says his work on “Duck Season’s” behalf has been driven simply by his intense love of the movie rather than any personal relationship with Eimbcke or the film’s producer Christian Valdelievre.

“Let me put it this way: I’ve seen his film way more times than I’ve seen Fernando,” says Cuaron. In Los Angeles briefly from London, where he is finishing “Children of Men,” Cuaron spent a day doing interviews for “Duck Season” before hosting an evening screening that was also attended by the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. “My involvement with this film is purely as a fan, as a groupie.”

But Cuaron did substantially more than talking up the film to friends. “He spent a lot of time e-mailing distributors,” says Eimbcke, “so when I went to Toronto or other festivals, lots of people came to me, ‘Oh, Alfonso told us about the film.’ ”

Cuaron was surprised by the responses he got while cheerleading on behalf of the film. “I started making my phone calls, and distributors would say, ‘Oh, I love that film!’ ‘OK, are you going to put it out?’ ‘No.’ ”

Considering that the film has managed to travel the world, there is something more than appropriate about the film’s being released, at last, under Cuaron’s banner of Esperanto Films. Or “filmoj” as one would say in the language of Esperanto, created as a means of fostering international communication. A young man in Mexico sees films from New York and Japan and is inspired to make his own cinematic statement about life.

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Older brother/younger brother?

DURING an afternoon of tag-team press duties, Cuaron enters a room wearing green cords and a green sweater. As he speaks, he absent-mindedly fiddles with a paper fastener lying on a table, clamping and unclamping it to the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. A few minutes later, Eimbcke enters wearing blue workpants matched with a blue sweater. Their similar attire mirrors the connection between the two -- alike but different. Settling in, Eimbcke picks up the same fastener, left behind by Cuaron, and attaches it to his own hand in the same way. The two are separated in age by nine years, and there is something of an older brother/younger brother vibe between them.

They have a fast friendship and seem to be conversing with each other through their films. “I think it’s a common thing, some kind of communication,” Eimbcke says. “I remember when I was in film school seeing his first film and it was really fresh. When I finished the first treatment of ‘Duck Season,’ I remember thinking, ‘It’s like “Y Tu Mama Tambien.” ’ I think Alfonso saw in my film the same freshness he put into his own first film.”

Cuaron’s take on their relationship is a little more unexpected. “For me there’s a selfish aspect to it. It’s great for Fernando and his film, but for me after years of following the old masters, there comes a moment where you need the push of the young masters. You need to keep your work in perspective, not only with the old masters but also with what the young filmmakers are bringing. Otherwise you end up being redundant, your work becomes brittle and passe.”

Though many filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Jodie Foster, have previously lent their names to help in the release of someone else’s film, the enthusiasm Cuaron shows toward “Duck Season” is remarkable and infectious. He likens it to hearing a catchy song and wanting to share it with others.

“He’s totally giddy,” says Laura Kim, executive vice president of marketing and publicity at Warner Independent, about Cuaron. “He’s really lifted this movie. It could have gone on and never been released. It’s a great gesture of largess. Because he’s busy with his own movie, he’s got things to do.”

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Will people see it?

OF course, just because the film is finally reaching theaters stateside doesn’t guarantee that audiences will actually turn up. Many of the same things that made “Duck Season” a risky proposition for U.S. distributors had also proved difficult when the film was released in Mexico. According to Valdelievre, the film did well by art house standards but was certainly not a blockbuster, and he admits it fell well below his own box office expectations. There as here, the very things that make the film stand out make it tough going from a business perspective.

“When you compare it to most of the films in Mexico,” said Valdelievre, “this is a very small story that forces you to concentrate. That’s very different from any Mexican film I can think of. Mexican movies tend to add more: more violence, more blood, more music, more action. This one goes in the exact opposite direction.”

Eimbcke’s focus definitely sets him apart from other up-and-coming Mexican filmmakers, says Lucero Solorzano, a critic and radio host in Mexico City. “I think he is standing alone. Young filmmakers are going through a wave of much darker movies, dark stories about the violence in Mexico City, or the kidnappings,” Solorzano says. “Eimbcke made up a story about such a simple thing; I think it’s a very important movie from that perspective, that you don’t have to do many big things, complicated stories.

“The main star in the movie, the most important thing in the movie, is the story. This is very refreshing.”

It’s easy to understand why the film has garnered so many awards and the support of a filmmaker like Cuaron. Understated and charming, “Duck Season” draws in the viewer with its confident style and light touch. One of Eimbcke’s most successful strategies is the way in which he continually doles out new information about the characters, so that the dynamic between them, and viewers’ understanding of them, is constantly being redrawn. The camera may not move, but the footing underneath “Duck Season” is constantly shifting.

Eimbcke explains that part of his writing process was to craft lengthy biographies on each of the characters, “so I knew everything about them, I had a lot of information. It was like dealing cards. If I didn’t know what to do, I’d go back to the deck. ‘Oh, she likes candy.’ It gave me clues on where to go.”

The film’s centerpiece scene comes when the pizza deliveryman, who ends up hanging around most of the afternoon, takes a shine to a painting of ducks on one of the walls of the apartment. It is a cheap and somewhat tacky piece of generic art, but he rhapsodizes about ducks in flight, the solidarity exhibited in how each takes a turn at the front of the flying V, only to eventually slide back and allow another duck a turn to lead. The deliveryman may be talking about ducks, but he is also providing the key to the film and a map for the interactions of the four main characters.

Eimbcke confesses he lifted the speech from the work of Uruguayan poet and journalist Eduardo Galeano. The moment plays as more lyrical than on-the-nose, but Eimbcke did have reservations about the monologue. He snips at the air with both hands as he says, “There’s always the editing room. And when I saw it in the edit room I liked it. I didn’t care that it was so literal.”

It is the way the moment breaks through the film’s hazy ephemera that gives it such emotional force. For that matter, Eimbcke’s not so sure that what others call the “nothing” happening in the rest of the film is really nothing. “I was always interested in things without importance,” he says. “I believe that everything is important. For example, if you go to buy shoes, it’s not only a pair of shoes, they have some greater meaning. So I always like apparently silly things, because I’m sure they’re not so silly.”

For Cuaron, the experience of acting as patron to another filmmaker has its own rewards, and though some might be excited to flex their newfound Hollywood clout, he sees it somewhat differently. “I don’t think the word is ‘excited.’ I’m not excited about that side of it. For some people, business is a turn-on. For me, it’s just what you have to do to get a result.

“It is pleasing to find yourself in a position where you can help stuff you believe in and people are going to trust in your taste. The exciting thing is to know the film is going to be released, that people are going to see this film.”