The opening scenes of Lake Tahoe veer between long, sunbaked shots of a tiny town in the Yucatan and moments of complete blackness; the only real action in the film’s first half-hour (a minor car crash) takes place during one of these blackouts. And then we follow Juan (Diego Cataño) as he meets people—an infirm old man, a karate fanatic, a comically inept teenage mother—while searching for a new part for his damaged Nissan. The camera, at first, seems indifferent to Juan: It’s pulled back so far from the action that shot after shot resembles an early side-scrolling Nintendo game, where we see a static set and the entirety of Juan’s body as he walks from the left of the screen to the right.
Eventually, as Juan walks around town, accruing a long list of tasks he must complete before his car can be fixed: To get the part, he must visit a friend to borrow the cash, but before he can do that, he must babysit for a while, and before he does that, he has to watch a mechanic eat his breakfast. The pacing here is important; you can’t watch Lake Tahoe in a hurry. You’ve got to follow behind it patiently.
The movie spans only 24 hours, but it’s the right 24 hours. Along the way, we learn that Juan wants to fix more than just his car; he’s trying to figure out how to repair a broken life and determine his role in putting his family back together. For the patient viewer, the rewards are many: Fernando Eimbcke, the director of the quiet, gentle Duck Season, controls his film’s pauses and silences with the assuredness of a great symphony orchestra conductor, making Lake Tahoe a perfectly refreshing, reinvigorating pause button on a noisy summer movie season.