The Year 2002: Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron)

At the beginning of the decade Mexican cinema entered something of a golden era of film-making, with the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu paving the way, Alfonso's Cuaron's 'Y Tu Mama Tambien's' smashed the box office in it's home country and became a huge international hit. With frank depictions of sex and drug taking, 'Y Tu Mama Tambien', a coming of age movie about two teenage boys who take to the road with a women in her late twenties, courted controversy wherever shown as well as critical acclaim. On hand, with another sterling submission to Counting Down The Zeroes, is Film Dr. of the superb 'The Film Doctor', a teacher of cinema studies who's constantly evaluting the changing sphere of movies with one excellent post after another, finds a film 'that dares to encompass the inequalities and complexities of Mexican society' and realises that it is possible to 'make a thoughtful, observant, and subtle study of stoned horny teenagers'

Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien (And Your Mama Too) holds up as a groundbreaking work of the recent Latin renaissance in film because it seamlessly integrates a Godardian social analysis of Mexico with a teenage sex comedy. While American teen-oriented movies like Old School and American Pie are still hampered by their snickering sophomoric naughtiness and the constraints of the R-rating, Y Tu Mama Tambien proposes that one can make a thoughtful, observant, and subtle study of stoned horny teenagers, and that hormones need not overwhelm a film portrait that dares to encompass the inequalities and complexities of Mexican society.

The story concerns Tenoch (Diego Luna), son of a wealthy politician, and the middle class Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal), both finding themselves bored one summer after their respective girlfriends leave them to travel in Italy. At a wedding, they meet up with Luisa (Maribel Verdu), the 28 year old wife of a writer, and try to lure her on a road trip to a secret beach called “Boca del Cielo” (“Heaven’s Mouth”), a place that they made up on the spot. Luisa says no at first, but when her husband confesses to sleeping with another woman, she suddenly agrees to go, so the two teenagers borrow a station wagon from Julio’s sister and take off.

Cuaron begins the film with several sex scenes that serve as a hook, but as Julio, Tenoch, and Luisa wander the Mexican countryside and smoke dope, Cuaron continually complicates matters through the suggestive use of mise-en-scene, lengthening shots that heighten the realism of each scene, and the frequent interruption of a Godardian voiceover that explains details that the principal characters often could not know (Cuaron has acknowledged the influence of Godard’s Masculine Feminine on the writing of the film). For instance, early on in the movie, the two friends complain about a traffic jam that they encounter, but Cuaron then silences their conversation and allows a narrator to state the real cause of the jam-- a migrant bricklayer who was killed by a vehicle because he couldn’t get to work easily by another route. At another time, Cuaron introduces the viewer to a fisherman named Chuy, first seen lying down contentedly with his family on the beach, but the narrator informs us that later Chuy will lose his profession due to the construction of a luxury hotel in the area. He will instead end up working as a janitor. As the narrator says, “he will never fish again.” Through many of these intriguing mini-expositions, Cuaron augments the story of the two teenagers trying to seduce an older woman with more sinister images of government officials busting people on the roadside. He also suggests how Mexico’s different classes have little to do with each other, and especially how often the poor get left behind as the rest of the country joins the global economy.

Cuaron is also very good a developing image patterns that expand upon the film’s themes. He explores the homoerotic and competitive aspects of Tenoch’s and Julio’s relationship in part through several scenes involving water and swimming. First we see them racing underwater in a country club pool. Then, when they become increasingly jealous once Tenoch sleeps with Luisa, and after Julio tells his friend that he slept with Tenoch’s girlfriend, Cuaron includes a similar shot of both guys swimming in a semi-abandoned hotel pool full of leaves, thereby conveying the sense that they have moved into less predictable and less domesticated waters as they continue on their road trip. Later, once they arrive at the beach, the camera follows Luisa as she jumps into the sea, thereby pictorially summarizing the water theme with her last bit of advice to the guys: “Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea.” With these words, one understands more of Cuaron’s method of immersing the viewer into the cultural and social complexities of the Mexican countryside. When it comes to matters of sex especially, he wants full candor, and full acknowledgement of its paradoxes. By the end of the film, Tenoch and Julio end up drunkenly kissing each other while enjoying a threesome with Luisa, but they cannot fully accept this homoerotic side, and so their friendship essentially ends. By concluding in this way, Cuaron suggests how they (and all of us, perhaps) would like to maintain categories and distinctions, especially when it comes to the erotic, but the movie is always more open to the nuances of their friendship, just as it is to what’s going on around them as they explore the country on their journey beachward. And with the assured cinematic technique that will find its culmination in Children of Men (1996), Cuaron shows that there’s no reason why a movie cannot depict the fun of a stoned and sex-filled road trip within the greater canvas of Mexico’s still evolving understanding of itself.