Starring Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal, Maribel Verdú, Juan Carlos Remolina

Written by Carlos Cuarón and Alfonso Cuarón.

In Spanish with English subtitles

Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) is an honest coming-of-age road-film about two 17-year-old Mexican boys experiencing a rite of passage most of us experience in one way or another in that magical, fortuitous, serendipitous time of beginning adulthood.  The film captures that time in such a vivid way that the feeling we come away with, is of life lived on its edge, its most raw and intense. Joy is more vibrant, sorrow more bleak, the lessons learned about life and friendship are more poignant and penetrating.  Visually it is wonderfully rich, the colours and lighting doing much to increase the impact of the film. The experiences of the main characters test their views of life, friendship, sex, death, all with a colourful, ever-changing Mexican background full of social upheaval and political demonstrations which have nothing to do with the plot but which are none the less an essential ingredient of the film.

The film’s opening goes straight to the main focus of a teenage boy’s life with separate scenes of Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) having the kind of rapid sex teenagers usually have with their girlfriends, before the girls leave for a holiday in Italy. Tenoch is the privileged son of a corrupt politician and a new-age mother who cleans auras, while Julio is from far more humble stock. His mother works as a secretary and his sister is a civil-rights activist university student. The two are friends, sharing the same interests – sex, jerking-off, drugs and a reluctance to study or take anything seriously. Tenoch wants to be a writer, but is easily distracted. They are members of a group called Charlolastros – ‘spiritual cowboys’- whose manifesto is more flippant than anything else and eventually, of little enough importance to them to be easily broken. Later they are shocked at how much it hurts to find one of their erstwhile precious tenets broken, though each has held himself above the need to conform to such a restraint on their own natural hedonism. The self-knowledge this gives them is a major maturation lesson along this road.

At a wedding the two meet 28-year-old Luisa (Maribel Verdú), a mysterious Spanish beauty from Madrid. Openly drawn by her serene sexuality and confidence, in jocular fashion they invent a hidden destination to which they would like to take her, a beach called ‘Heaven’s Mouth’. Luisa jokes along with them until they are interrupted by her husband, Tenoch’s pretentious cousin Jano. Some days later, Luisa is devastated by two separate pieces of bad news, one of which is her husband’s infidelity while he is away on a business trip.  Needing distraction she contacts Tenoch to take the boys up on their offer. Leaving her home, the camera stays behind in the empty apartment and watches her from an open upstairs window as she gets into the car with the boys. It’s one of those moments in the film that allows us to step back. It also introduces a curious sense of ‘something other’ going on in this film.  The room itself feels like a lonelier place for her departure.

Director Alfonso Cuarón, along with the cinematographic collaborator of his previous films, Emmanuel Lubezki, has departed from the style of his previous triumph Great Expectations in that here there are no close-ups or individual points of view. We see the action unfold objectively, as equal observers of all the main characters. In fact, often, just as an observer sometimes gets diverted from their main focus, the camera occasionally gets pulled away to something other than the main story, at for example, peasants at the roadside being harassed by militia, a roadside shrine or a herd of feral pigs. A further distancing technique is employed more frequently, when the soundtrack is silenced and the voice of the narrator, aloof and impartial, records details about those with whom our trio of main characters tangentially interact. It gives a sense of perspective, that this hot, intensely lived short period of time is simply a few moments intersecting on a continuum of several lives.

So, as our trio leaves Mexico City, they are delayed by an ambulance, blocking the road beside the covered corpse of a construction worker killed by a speeding bus as he ran across a highway.  Similarly, the road they travel is infinitely more meaningful for having been the scene, ten years before, as the narrator tells us, of another fatal accident, with broken and bloody chickens in overturned crates and a grieving woman kneeling over her child in the dirt. And the theme of the fragility of life and the certainty of our mortality surfaces again and again and underscores this film in its headlong rush of passion and the abandonment to carefree indulgence, the instinctive moth-to-a-candle pleasure-seeking of youth.

Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal are exceptional in their roles of the two testosterone-driven boys. Cuarón manoeuvres them so lightly and adroitly that they show their exuberance in the most natural way.  More than matching the boys’ eager grasping of life, but with more humour and patience borne of the decade difference in their ages, Luisa (Maribel Verdú is as potent a sexual siren role as I have seen), seems for her own reasons to agree to their agenda. Along the way their car breaks down, and they are obliged to spend the night in a motel. When Julio and Tenoch creep along the corridor to spy into her room as she undresses they are sobered and confounded by the sight of her racked with sobs. Not understanding her heartbreak nor the reason for it, they creep away. 

When separate interactions between Luisa and the boys causes a major angry blow-up between the friends, she puts her foot down. “When you play with babies,” she fumes, “you end up changing diapers!”

Threatening to leave unless they abide by her rules, she takes on the role of an erotic educator, initiating them into deeper levels of intimacy than they, perhaps, except perhaps under the seductive influence of tequila, would have wished.  On her own, we see her experiencing unknown depths of pain and grief. When she is with the boys, she shows no trace of it. She is bestowing a sensual gift the value of which they will not know until much later in their lives.

Meeting a fisherman with his wife and young family, who sells them food and takes them on a boat tour of the beaches, they astonishingly actually find a beach called ‘Heaven’s Mouth’. It all seems magically to fit in with this rarefied level of heady hedonism she is showing them. Each interaction is an expansion into receiving gifts seemingly from life itself, finding that in this playtime suspended from the rat race, life itself directs the shots. Cradling the fisherman’s child on her lap sounds a deep note of sadness in Luisa. “Float like a dead person,” she tells a child as she supports her floating in the sea, and the camera goes underwater in another of those moments of pause, to see from another viewpoint. Then later, breasting the waves on her own, her own inner voice, full of love and wisdom, is heard.

 “Life is like the surf,” she says. "When you give yourself, give like the waves.”

The end of the movie to a large extent belongs to the narrator, except for the meeting of the boys a year later where a different perspective again is gained and, like the boys, we understand the whole picture so much better than we did. Like them we can see how their journey with Luisa was pivotal to their growth and precipitated a profound revelation of themselves, the intimacy of which was so searing that their erstwhile superficiality is momentarily cracked, perhaps allowing to settle there, the seed of a later flowering.

© Avril Carruthers          17^th August 2002