Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: April 20, 2011

Y Tu Mamá También / And Your Mother Too (2001)
720p BluRay Rip | MKV | 1280 x 688 | x264 @ 4297 Kbps | DTS 5.1 @ 1510 Kbps | 105 mins | 4,51 Gb
Lang: Spanish | Subs: English (embedded in MKV)
Genre: Comedy, Drama | Nominated for Oscar + 34 wins & 27 nominations | Mexico

Mexican-born, New York-based filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón directed this Mexican box-office smash hit about a pair of randy upper-class buddies that sparked some controversy for its frank depiction of drug use and sexual exploration. With their respective girlfriends away in Europe, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and his upper-class friend Tenoch (Diego Luna) are looking forward to a summer full of drink, drugs, and cheap meaningless sex. During a wedding, they meet Luisa (Maribel Verdú) - the 28-year-old wife of Tenoch's scholarly cousin - and try to convince her to go on a road trip to Heaven's Mouth, a made-up beach paradise the two claim is on the Oaxacan coast. To their surprise, Luisa - who is looking to escape her troubled life for a spell – agrees to go along. Two days into the trip, tension starts to build between the two friends: Luisa has had sex with each, and now both lads are not-so-quietly vying for her affection. Soon simmering jealousies boil over into savage arguments, threatening to completely destroy their friendship. After an enormously successful run in Mexico and Guatemala, this film was screened to much acclaim at the 2001 Venice, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals.

IMDB

Y Tu Mamá También has been casually referred to as a Spanish-language American Pie, perhaps because both films include footage of taboo body fluids floating in liquids they don't usually call home – a swimming pool here, a beer there. But that comparison doesn't nearly do justice to Alfonso Cuarón's bold, sexually explicit yet artistically justified coming-of-age piece, which climbs outside the box at every turn. More generous films to associate it with are Run Lola Run and Amélie; both share Mamá's curiosity about the interrelationship of seemingly unlike people and places, and contemplate the pasts and futures of bit players in a manner that seems essential, not superfluous. Yet it's not as glossy as those films, either. Mamá retains a documentary-style realism that's less dependant on set pieces, preferring the messy yet basically benign continuum of life. Mamá's illuminating narration is never intrusive, even though it cuts off the soundtrack in a way that sounds like abrupt speaker failure; it contextualizes the action while leaving the deeper profundities to the viewer's own thoughts. Cuarón's fascinating decisions are as regular as the free-flowing bull sessions so naturally performed by lead actors Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal in and around Mexico City, and on their road trip to self-discovery. Cuarón, seeming more comfortable in his element than in a Hollywood release like the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Great Expectations, challenges the actors' talents in a handful of takes that last minutes on end, many of which include the camera moving seamlessly through the environment. Even with all these accomplishments, it's still as funny and as titillating as anything out there – maybe because it doesn't have to try so hard to do either.
Derek Armstrong, Rovi

"Y Tu Mama Tambien" is described on its Web site as a "teen drama," which is like describing "Moulin Rouge" as a musical. The description is technically true but sidesteps all of the reasons to see the movie. Yes, it's about two teenage boys and an impulsive journey with an older woman that involves sexual discoveries. But it is also about the two Mexicos. And it is about the fragility of life and the finality of death. Beneath the carefree road movie that the movie is happy to advertise is a more serious level–and below that, a dead serious level.

The movie, whose title translates as "And Your Mama, Too," is another trumpet blast that there may be a New Mexican Cinema a-bornin'. Like "Amores Perros," which also stars Gael Garcia Bernal, it is an exuberant exercise in interlocking stories. But these interlock not in space and time, but in what is revealed, what is concealed, and in the parallel world of poverty through which the rich characters move.

The surface is described in a flash: Two Mexican teenagers named Tenoch and Julio, one from a rich family, one middle class, are free for the summer when their girlfriends go to Europe. At a wedding they meet Luisa, 10 years older, the wife of a distant cousin; she's sexy and playful. They suggest a weekend trip to the legendary beach named Heaven's Mouth. When her husband cheats on her, she unexpectedly agrees, and they set out together on a lark.


This level could have been conventional but is anything but, as directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Carlos. Luisa kids them about their sex lives in a lighthearted but tenacious way, until they have few secrets left, and at the same time she teases them with erotic possibilities. The movie is realistic about sex, which is to say, franker and healthier than the smutty evasions forced on American movies by the R rating. We feel a shock of recognition: This is what real people do and how they do it, sexually, and the MPAA has perverted a generation of American movies into puerile masturbatory snickering.

Whether Luisa will have sex with one or both of her new friends is not for me to reveal. More to the point is what she wants to teach them, which is that men and women learn to share sex as a treasure they must carry together without something spilling–that women are not prizes, conquests or targets, but the other half of a precarious unity. This is news to the boys, who are obsessed with orgasms (needless to say, their own).

The progress of that story provides the surface arc of the movie. Next to it, in a kind of parallel world, is the Mexico they are driving through. They pass police checkpoints, see drug busts and traffic accidents, drive past shanty towns, and are stopped at a roadblock of flowers by villagers demanding a donation for their queen–a girl in bridal white, representing the Virgin. "You have a beautiful queen," Luisa tells them. Yes, but the roadblock is genteel extortion. The queen has a sizable court that quietly hints a donation is in order.


At times during this journey the soundtrack goes silent and we hear a narrator who comments from outside the action, pointing out the village where Tenoch's nanny was born and left at 13 to seek work. Or a stretch of road where, two years earlier, there was a deadly accident. The narration and the roadside images are a reminder that in Mexico and many other countries a prosperous economy has left an uneducated and penniless peasantry behind.

They arrive at the beach. They are greeted by a fisherman and his family, who have lived here for four generations, sell them fried fish, rent them a place to stay. This is an unspoiled paradise. (The narrator informs us the beach will be purchased for a tourist hotel, and the fisherman will abandon his way of life, go to the city in search of a job and finally come back here to work as a janitor.) Here the sexual intrigues which have been developing all along will find their conclusion.

Beneath these two levels (the coming-of-age journey, the two Mexicos) is hidden a third. I will say nothing about it, except to observe there are only two shots in the entire movie that reflect the inner reality of one of the characters. At the end, finally knowing everything, you think back through the film–or, as I was able to do, see it again.


Alfonso Cuaron is Mexican but his second and third features were big-budget American films. I thought "Great Expectations" (1998), with Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anne Bancroft, brought a freshness and visual excitement to the updated story. I liked "A Little Princess" (1995) even more. It is clear Cuaron is a gifted director, and here he does his best work to date. Why did he return to Mexico to make it? Because he has something to say about Mexico, obviously, and also because Jack Valenti and the MPAA have made it impossible for a movie like this to be produced in America. It is a perfect illustration of the need for a workable adult rating: too mature, thoughtful and frank for the R, but not in any sense pornographic. Why do serious film people not rise up in rage and tear down the rating system that infantilizes their work? The key performance is by Maribel Verdu as Luisa. She is the engine that drives every scene she's in, as she teases, quizzes, analyzes and lectures the boys, as if impatient with the task of turning them into beings fit to associate with an adult woman. In a sense she fills the standard role of the sexy older woman, so familiar from countless Hollywood comedies, but her character is so much more than that–wiser, sexier, more complex, happier, sadder. It is true, as some critics have observed, that "Y Tu Mama" is one of those movies where "after that summer, nothing would ever be the same again." Yes, but it redefines nothing".

Two randy teenagers and a sophisticated older woman sounds like orgasmic delight at the box office. Make it a road movie to lubricate inhibition. Make it in Mexico where the colours are strong and the heat pricks your eyes. Is this Jules Et Jim for 21st century romantics? No way, Jose!

After a dalliance in Hollywood for the magical children's film, A Little Princess, and the supra-stylised modern makeover of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, director Alfonso Cuaron returns home for a little handheld realism, as best buddies Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) think, talk and practise sex. These lads are typical teenagers who abuse their parents' trust, cheat on their girlfriends and take life as a glorious gift from the god of good times.

They are lucky because they don't have to worry about money. Tenoch's dad is a leading politician and a member of the upper-class. Julio's mother is a secretary and his sister an activist at university. Louisa (Maribel Verdu) is from Spain. She lives with a cousin of Tenoch's, a budding author, prone to drink and self-aggrandisement. Tenoch and Julio meet her at a posh wedding reception, where they hit on her for the fun of it. She responds with amusement, quietly flattered, as they talk of going on a trip to a paradise beach in the north of the country, entirely made up for her benefit, and ask her to join them.

A few days later, after an emotional crisis with the cousin, she accepts their offer and so they have to borrow a car and think of somewhere that might resemble a paradise beach. The journey becomes the movie and it is a journey of self-discovery. Although set up as a menage a trois, it doesn't fit the stereotype. The boys may be oversexed, but they are still boys, while she carries a darker secret.

The film loses direction once they settle at the beach, with a friendly fisherman and his family. The boys fall out over past sexual revelations and Louisa is not going to play Nursey. Screenwriter Carlos Cuaron, the director's brother, uses a narrative voice-over to interrupt proceedings and confer trivial snippets of information. This begins to get irritating.

The characters of Tenoch and Julio are beautifully realised by Luna and Bernal. They bring energy and verve. Verdu, remembered as the loveliest of the beguiling sisters in Belle Epoque, is astonishingly cool. She handles difficult sexual scenes with frankness and courage. Louisa remains a mystery and Verdu conveys this well, on the one hand seductive, on the other closed.

The title translates as And Your Mother Too, which in English is forgettable and meaningless. The film is neither. It's fun while it lasts. And afterwards? Y Tu Que?
Angus Wolfe Murray

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