Two teenage boys, whose girlfriends are on vacation in Europe, embark on a road trip with an older woman in the hope of getting laid.

A smart and surprising little odyssey, Y Tu Mamá También manages to include plenty of eager copulation while it investigates the themes of identity, trust, destiny, and the ways in which all of these things are hopelessly entwined. The film also reveals how changeable it all is, this darned shifting reality, weaving together hilarious observations on male friendship and female wisdom with a purposely jarring, third-person voice over.

It’s nearly impossible to make a meaningful erotic movie in any language. First of all, the act itself can be pretty comical when viewed by a third party. Laughter tends to undercut emotional depth, unless the director is of Billy-Wilder-caliber, and though the people involved in the eternal clinch onscreen are no doubt having fun, it’s hard not to feel left out from any distance. If the moviemaker succeeds pornographically, appealing to the prurient interests of a sizeable portion of the audience, then the humping tends to stop the show in its tracks. Better to fade out as things are getting hot, let the audience fill in the blanks, and get on with the story, if you have one.

But director Alfonso Cuarón knows just what he is doing, and why, whenever he throws the principals of Y Tu Mamá También into their periodic fits of tussling, and rather than becoming the usual distraction, the film’s sex scenes take on the high stakes emotional significance of real life bumping and grinding. Not only is it comical, it’s frightening, ridiculous and compelling all at once. Cuarón also knows that the most interesting things you can put into a movie are the things people really do. Nothing makes our pupils dilate like the appearance of another human face, and nothing makes a better movie than uncensored human behavior.

Y Tu Mamá También is not exclusively about sex, though it has more groping and grunting than the average movie and the dialogue outside of the bedroom sometimes achieves maximum comic raunch. But it’s mostly about two boys who think of nothing else but sex, as boys will, and the life experiences they have when they encounter a real woman who draws them into her own personal journey of self-fulfillment. That might sound like a load of touchy-feely crap, or like an impossibly compromised male fantasy, but the underlying themes of the film begin transcending the boys’ shenanigans early on, taking us into unexpected territory. Or as the saying goes: Be careful what you ask for young man, for you may get it.

To reveal anymore of the film’s drama would be a transgression on responsible movie reviewing. Y Tu Mamá También is a deeply touching little masterwork, the best film about a ménage à trois since Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), and an excellent coming-of-age film for our own era, a realistic narrative that shows us all the nasty, unrated stuff we came to see, yet still allows the cycles of attraction and the vagaries of living to retain their deepest mysteries at the end.

Beautifully acted by the three principals, Verdú , Bernal and Luna. Cuarón makes especially good use of a contemporary movie trope, commonly seen outside of Hollywood, in which the narrative will suddenly veer off on a literary aside to give a character’s history or future, often for ironic effect. In Cuarón’s hands, the convention is taken beyond gimmickry to become an indispensable part of the film’s fabric, and many things which remain unspoken during the bulk of the movie come to the surface in an elegantly realized denouement, one of the hardest of all hat tricks to perform.

A movie that violates most of the codes of American distribution (i.e., too much thrusting), Y Tu Mamá También enjoyed only a limited release in the States last spring. Leave it to the ratings administration to keep us all safe from honesty. But the film is now widely available on DVD, and if you just avoid renting it at Blockbuster, you should be able to see the film Alfonso Cuarón intended.

Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too)

directed by Alfonso Cuarón; screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos Cuarón; director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki; edited by Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodríguez

with: Maribel Verdú (Luisa), Gael García Bernal (Julio), Diego Luna (Tenoch)

1 hr., 45 m.; Good Machine - IFC Films, unrated

US release date: March 2002

NOTES:

Currently the biggest box-office hit in the history of Mexican cinema.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 2nd, 2002 at 7:15 pm and is filed under DVD, Eric Barker, Film. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.