by Alfonso Cuarón, 2002.
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Diego Luna, Maribel Verdú.
Rating: 8/10, 9.5/10.
Perhaps the best thing about Y Tu Mamá También, a film full of good things, was that I didn’t realize until long after I saw it that it was a road trip movie. And it certainly is: two bored, idle Mexican youths, Julio (Bernal) and Tenoch (Luna) take a beautiful older woman, Luisa (Verdú, who looks something like an even prettier Marisa Tomei) on a long car trip to an imaginary beach which, it turns out, isn’t so imaginary after all. Along the way, old secrets are revealed, they all learn about themselves and each other, and all the usual road trip movie things happen along the way.
It’s interesting. When the movie started, I was thinking, "I’m not going to complain about a movie filled with beautiful people having lots of sex and being naked a lot of the time"—which it is—"but this movie isn’t actually all that GOOD." Eventually, though, I realised that all that beautiful nudity was actually covering up the goodness of the film, that I was having trouble seeing past it. And, oddly enough, that somewhat hidden brilliance also somewhat covers up a lurking structural triteness (that is, the road trip cliché.) Not to say that anything about the movie is trite or cliché. Just that it works within those boundaries to create something entirely different.
And all those layers of my experience with the film mirror all the layers of the film itself. On the surface it’s a movie about three beautiful people who go on a trip and have sex with each other. On the next level, it’s about how these people interact with one another. On the next, it’s about how they relate to themselves. Further down, it’s about how people in general relate to each other and themselves. Possibly even deeper down, but more likely just off to the side somewhere, is an entirely different level, having more to do with the world around the characters than with the characters themselves.
The more I think about it, the more I realise how much the film flirts with banality. The narrator (Giménez Cacho), for example, could easily have fallen into that trap as he tells us about things happening in the past, present, and future of different characters and places we encounter. But somehow he manages to avoid that. And while at first the observations he makes seem random—interesting, but random—we eventually realize that they all do, in fact, have something in common, and that that central strand has more to do with the movie than we may at first think. And look at the very last few lines in the film. If the dialogue and the narrator’s lines had been switched, if we’d gotten the last lines of dialogue before the last of the narrator’s lines, it would have been a horrible, boring, overdone, overdramatic, trite, cliché, banal ending. But just from that simple reversal, it becomes moving, genuinely emotional, and wonderful.
And, just so we’re all clear—Bernal and Luna are probably two of the most straight-up gorgeous people I’ve ever seen (though you might not know it from the crappy picture at the top), and Verdú’s quite the looker, too.