Lake Tahoe

In Fernando Eimbcke's peculiar film, a young man crashes his car in the sleepy Mexican town where his family lives. No-one seems interested in fixing it. Eventually, someone does. His engagements with the various oddballs he meets while trying to repair it are set against the backdrop of the recent death of his father. And that's it. The film seems part a meditation on cosmic loneliness, and part a satire on national decay, but I've rarely seen a film with so little dialogue and action: each scene is separated by a black interlude, and much of the plot is implied in the gaps, rather than shown. Eimbcke succeeds in creating a mood, but the absence of any conventional storytelling imperative makes it a sparse experience. It feels more like a proof of concept than a completely finished movie.