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The literal "duck season" in Fernando Eimbcke's first feature is a painting. It hangs above the television in Flama's (Daniel Miranda) apartment, and has recently become a point of contention in his parents' divorce: Both say they want it. For 14-year-old Flama, however, this mundane image of ducks and a pond is only a miserable reminder of the imminent disruption of his own routine.

That routine is on insistent display in Duck Season, beginning with the first images of Flama's middle-class Tlatelolco neighborhood. Static long shots show stark telephone wires, graffitied walls and bedraggled basketball nets. Inside Flama's building, the camera waits in the hallway near the elevator, watching the apartment door open and close as Flama's mother exits, leaving him and his best friend Moko (Diego Cataño) to entertain themselves as they do every Sunday. Her departure is at once casual and telling. You don't see her face; she's just the parent who's leaving her latchkey kid on his own. Again.

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY: Diego Cataño and Daniel Miranda.

Inside the apartment, the boys settle in for a game of Halo, first pouring themselves perfectly topped-off glasses of Coke, then planting themselves on the living room floor, eyes fixed on the TV screen, fingers flitting over their controllers. Their concentration is hardly interrupted when a neighbor, 16-year-old Rita (Daniela Parea), asks to use the oven, claiming hers is broken. The boys barely acknowledge her, still focused on their game, "Bush" versus "Bin Laden."

So immersed are Moko and Flama in their distraction that their rhythm breaks only when it's time for lunch. The sharply defining fades to black and bleakly elegant black-and-white cinematography suggest the kids' narrow experiences and desires, laying out the parameters of the day in precise but also repetitive, blurred-together pieces. They call the local pizza joint, guaranteed 30 minutes or less for delivery. Now the camera cuts outside the apartment, following the motorscooter-riding Ulises (Enrique Arreola) as he zips through alleys and takes a spill in front of a group of kids who laugh at him. At last, he makes it to the apartment (having to run up the stairs), but, it turns out, he's 11 seconds past the deadline.

Frustrated by the kids' stubbornness, Ulises plants himself in the apartment, refusing to leave until he's paid. When he agrees to play a video game to decide the payment matter, he and Flama engage seriously, each determined to establish his dominance. Just as the decision seems about to be made, the electricity goes out, and so nothing is done. Instead, the day goes on. Rita solicits Moko's help in her stirring and tasting (her first two cakes are disasters, so she makes a pan of marijuana-laced brownies instead). By the end of the afternoon, they're experimenting with French kissing as well, each taking small, separate steps toward conventional adulthood.

Out in the living room, Ulises is taking his own steps. His audience is the quietly fretful Flama, worried that this is his last boring Sunday with Moko, anticipating the unknown future of his parents' split and his move from the neighborhood. Under the guise of soothing the boy's anxieties, Ulises settles into storytelling mode, seated outside the bathroom door as Flama sits inside, unseen. And so Ulises imagines a listener for his own tentative confrontation with loss and immobility.

With Ulises' narrative, the film shifts visual gears, no longer observing from a distance, but displaying his memories in jagged, sharp-angled frames, indicating his sense of dislocation, the loss of ground implied by his perpetual adolescence. It won't come as a surprise that Ulises was not always a pizza delivery man. When a scheme to sell parrots ended abruptly (they died in his cold apartment), he worked for a time at a dog pound, killing the unwanted animals. Their bodies, broken and inert in his mind's eye, allude as well to his stymied life thus far.

Laments Ulises, "As my Aunt Lucha says, opportunities in life are like shotgun blasts, and I've already shot mine." On one level, this metaphor recalls the "duck season" painting (to which Ulises takes a particular liking), and on another, it speaks to his frustrations—which mirror the banal pleasures of the video game or the more extravagant perils of the broader world, where Bush and Bin Laden aren't just character names.

Ulises' story imposes another sort of gloss on the kids' stories. Though they all live inside stifling little rooms of melancholy, their shared afternoon of indulgence grants them glimpses of other possibilities: Moko's first kiss, Rita's imagined "family" and Flama's recognition of his parents as people who change, like everyone else. As Duck Season maintains a close focus on these small discoveries, it keeps the underlying despair at a distance.

Duck Season Directed by Fernando Eimbcke, A Warner Independent release, Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse