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Y Tu Mama Tambien
(And Your Mother Too)
****
Cinema Releases - July 12, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. 105
minutes. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Written by Alfonso Cuaron, Carlos Cuaron.
Starring Maribel Verdu, Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna, Marta Aura, Diana
Bracho, Emilio Echavarria, Isaac Sanchez, Veronica Langer, Griselle
Audirac.
"Y Tu Mama Tambien" is a wonderful,
forgiving movie -- one that understands how desire sometimes sidetracks us,
because that's the way nature works. This is not a movie that condones the
pursuit of self-gratification, but does acknowledge it, and lets us know
that we're human, and it's okay, just as long as we don't lose sight of the
world around us. It does this by being true to its characters, by observing
their personalities, by being soulful at the same time as tender, sexy and
very funny.
The film is a summer road movie set in Mexico.
Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna play two lads who have known each other
so long that they've developed a mythology around funny stories from their
past and written a manifesto that dictates how spare time must be spent.
Articles on this manifesto include 'one must get stoned at least once a day',
'jacking off rules' and 'never sleep with the girlfriend of one of your buddies'.
That last one is pretty hard to stick with.
Luna runs into the wife of one of his jerk older
cousins at a wedding one afternoon, and he and Bernal clumsily, gigglingly
attempt to chat her up. The boys allude to wild adventures and tell of a
legendary beach they're planning to drive to some time in the near future.
The wife, a striking brunette in her late 20s played by Maribel Verdu, doesn't
find these guys charming, but she thinks they're kinda cute. Later that week,
her husband confesses to being unfaithful in a speech that seems less like
remorse than self-pity. Verdu needs a drastic change of pace, so she rings
up Bernal and Luna, and tells them that she will join them if they're still
planning a beach holiday.
Away they go. No vacation was really planned,
but the chance to be alone with a beautiful, intelligent older woman is not
something any pair of male teenagers would pass up lightly, and so the guys
manage to improvise. They throw a schedule together and head off into the
sunset, driving, drinking, getting high, excitedly reminiscing, teasing and
making crude jokes.
A lot of things happen on the journey, including
fights, excitements and revelations. Nobody does anything that could be called
deep. What distinguishes "Y Tu Mama Tambien" from other teen movies is the
way its director, Alfonso Cuarson, sees his characters -- these are living,
breathing people who are sometimes giving, sometimes cruel, often awkward
or crude and always believable. There is a remarkable scene late on in the
picture in which the guys and the gal sit at a table, get drunk, let out
feelings, reveal secrets, tease each other's most vulnerable weaknesses,
and do so with good humour, their words choking out over laughter. A lesser
film would have made this The Big Catharsis Scene, but here it's just the
moment where the characters are finally as comfortable with each other as
they've been acting all along, and the performances are allowed to flow without
directorial interference. The truth of the scene is furthered by the fact
that it's not a convenient way to end the movie, but a natural introduction
to another event.
There are several sex scenes involving all sorts
of different partners, and they contain some of the most erotic images I've
seen at the movies. The cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, has a way of framing
faces to emphasise their humanity and lighting bodies to highlight their
sensuousness -- they are pale enough to be fragile, dark enough to be
striking.
The film also contains moments in which the soundtrack
goes quiet except for narration, and we see cutaways to things on the sides
of the frames. An old woman here, a car accident there, a demonstration,
a friend, a herd of escaped pigs. We hear about past, present and future,
and are left to contemplate them. We get a feeling for the culture and history
of Mexico's cities and towns, for its pleasures and pains, for its political
backdrop.
This is special. "Y Tu Mama Tambien" has found
the immediate beauty in a rowdy young adventure, reminded us at the same
that there are other things we have to consider in life once we've grown
up, and done it all without a moment of pretension. Watching the film we're
entertained and moved, and afterward it lingers in the mind, leaving us to
consider how we can pursue personal joy and still be of value to the wider
world. I am reminded of the films of Cameron Crowe, a director who sees us
as sweet creatures who can goofily mope through romantic misadventures and
still try to avoid being self-centred, and who understands our confusion
when we don't think we can succeed. There are reviews that have compared
"Y Tu Mama Tambien" to "American Pie", because both films are comedies about
horny boys that end up at sombre conclusions. The difference is that "Y Tu
Mama Tambien" evokes the feelings that go with sexuality and sombreness,
while "American Pie" sticks meaningless words in the mouths of its characters
as a way to bide time between butt jokes.
There is a road movie out now entitled "Crossroads".
It poses deep and feels shallow, and it thinks that learning how to make
ourselves happy is the key to growing up. The truth is that youth is the
time to enjoy our own insignificance, and learning selflessness is the real
sign of maturity. "Y Tu Mama Tambien" sees the complexity of life and recognises
its importance, while knowing there's nothing wrong with yearning for that
time when the only thing we have any reason to care about is the urge of
our genitalia.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
Footnote, November 2002: Having had a second
viewing of "American Pie 2", I think it was perhaps a little simplistic to
say that the "American Pie" films feature "meaningless words as a way to
bide time between butt jokes". Yes, there are plenty of crude gags, and the
dialogue is hardly as good as that in "Y Tu Mama Tambien", but the "Pie"
pictures deal with real issues (however simplistically), and the characters
speak with interesting comic rhythm. It's not exactly John Hughes, but it's
about the closest thing we have right now.
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