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Y Tu Mama Tambien
MBM Rating:
HOT ALERT: Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna

By Joe Mader
Frankly sexual and shockingly modern, Alfonso Cuaron's "Y Tu Mama Tambien" should thrill the same art house audiences as the celebrated but lesser "Amores Perros" and "Before Night Falls."

The Victorian fairy-tale sensibilities of Cuaron's earlier work aren't readily apparent in this Mexican production. But this film too deals with the theme of awakening, the metaphorical journey from adolescence to adulthood. Cuaron, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Carlos, is also dealing with the convergence of possibilities, coincidences and intersections that define a life.

Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) are 17-year-old Mexico City boys -- all raging adolescent lust and wolfish desire. At a family wedding, they spot the gorgeous Luisa (Maribel Verdu). Luisa is older than the boys, dwarfing them in emotional and sexual maturity, yet they see a kindred animal spirit. When the boys learn the new Spanish arrival wants to see a beach, they promise to take her to a secluded one. Luisa's husband approaches and ends their fantasy.

Days later, the husband, away on a business trip, calls Luisa with a drunken, self-pitying confession of infidelity, and she flees their temporary apartment and takes the boys up on their offer.

At its base, "Y Tu Mama" is a road movie. But never has a road movie taken so many different journeys. With Luisa, the boys are confronted with an adult sexuality -- a far cry from their own frantic wranglings. During the trip, Tenoch happens upon Luisa when she's in despair. He isn't up to dealing with Luisa's adult sorrows or her sexual needs, and their encounter ends with humiliation on both sides. This also drastically upsets Tenoch's relationship with Julio. When Luisa decides to restore the balance in the trio, Julio, too, is confronted with a force he's inadequate to.

Cuaron shot the movie in sequence, allowing the actors to develop naturally as the characters. He and longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki employ a roving camera that's never still. The camera is likely to look out a window in the middle of a conversation, picking up details Luisa and the boys are missing: scenes of abject poverty, police roadblocks, automobile accidents or peasants getting arrested.

For Cuaron, the boys' journey parallels that of Mexico itself. Tenoch and Julio's friendship may not survive this trip, but the boys do, and their relationship with the world will never be the same. A narrator refers to Vicente Fox's peaceful, democratic overthrow of the long-ruling PRI that happens soon after the culmination of the trip.

The title "Y Tu Mama Tambien" (And Your Mother Too) is both a boyish insult and a recognition of connectedness. Cuaron examines the necessity and the inadequacy of friendship. At the center of this film is the profound mystery of other human beings, what Philip Roth calls "all the million circumstances of the other fellow's life," the reason "why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong."

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