Y Tu Mamá También (no 78)

by Allan Fish

(Mexico 2001 105m) DVD1/2

Aka. And Your Mother, Too

Life is like the surf

p  Jorge Vergera  d  Alfonso Cuaron  w  Alfonso Cuaron, Carlos Cuaron  ph  Emmanuel Lubezki  ed  Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Rodriguez  art  Miguel Alvarez

Gael Garcia Bernal (Julio Zapata), Diego Luna (Tenoch Iturbide), Maribel Verdu (Luisa Cortés), Diana Bracho (Silvia), Emilio Echeverria (Miguel Iturbide), Ana Lopez Mercado (Ana Morelos), Maria Aura (Cecilia Huerta), Andres Almeida (Saba Madero),

If ever a film showed the chasm between modern day Hollywood and their international counterparts, it’s Y Tu Mamá También.  Hollywood knows well the characters of Julio and Tenoch, they call them Bill and Ted or the American Pie rejects, idiots in search of a lobotomy.  All they think of is sex and we suffer 90 minutes of mind-numbingly tedious nonsense designed to keep Seann William Scott and Jason Biggs in employment.  That the American fare is so utterly unwatchable that you wouldn’t even use DVDs of them as a drinks coaster, and that Y Tu Mamá También is so refreshing, is obvious with anyone with eyes to see.  For starters, there’s wit and subtlety.  Now I know, subtlety may not be the first thing we think of in the opening scene, where Tenoch and Cecilia are making love like Betty Blue and Zorg.  Another one soon follows, this time between Julio and his girlfriend Ana.  No body doubles, the nudity is worn like a badge of honour and with the candour of typically lustful teenagers with over-sexed libidos. 

            What we have here essentially is a road trip with sex as the driving force.  The difference here is that the two boys invite a sophisticated 28 year old Spanish woman on a trip to find the mythical beach of Heaven’s Mouth (Boca del Cielo).  It doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t matter, they don’t expect her to take up the offer anyway.  Imagine their shock then when, after being told by her husband that he’s been cheating on her, the woman, Luisa, comes with them on this trip to literally nowhere.  They both fancy her and want to get her into bed.  She’s just after a break from everything, but realises she’s free to do what she likes.  It’s a trip that will change them all.

            The narration that keeps the plot ticking over may seem like a lazy device – Robert McKee would be growling – and yet it’s imperative to getting over the retrospective nature of the film.  We assume it’s set in the here and now, and yet the narration speaks from the safety of hindsight, like some all-seeing eye.  Julio and Tenoch seem completely inseparable and yet Cuaron hints that it may not necessarily be the case.  Sure enough, after a few tequilas too many, Luisa retires to their room to give them the blowjob of their lives but the drink loosens up their inhibitions too much for even their liking and the friendship is doomed.  And what other film about teenage sex would climax with a homage to Annie Hall, as the two once inseparables meet a year or so later in a café over an uncomfortable coffee and the revelation about Luisa suddenly makes clearer that which previously had been murky.  The scene ends with them parting and the narrator stating quite openly that they will never see each other again.

            The trip to Boca del Cielo – and love the joke about there actually being a beach with that name when they get there – can then be seen to represent a final fling, not just before moving onto university and manhood, but of their friendship, like Corinthians 13’s “I put away childish things” brought to life.  Yet it’s so much more than that, filled with more truth than a dozen films of its ilk and as sexy as hell without being in the remotest way prurient.  Verdu is stunning as the object of their desires, while Luna and Bernal, who were both catapulted to stardom, make the ultimate pair of idiot teen braggarts, thinking the epitome of being suave is to “ram it in her and bang her till she begs for mercy”, who masturbate on springboards, and reciting their Charolastra Manifesto as if they believed that rubbish as much as the Monty Python Bruces.  It’s also gorgeously shot by Cuaron’s regular Lubezki and, despite the respective merits of his other work (not least the maddening Children of Men), still Cuaron’s finest work.