DIRECTED BY Alfonso Cuarón, 2001STARRING Maribel Verdú (Luisa), Diego Luna (Tenoch), Gael García Bernal (Julio)
CERTIFICATION 18: Frequent strong bad language, some strong sex/nudity, drug use
RUN TIME 101 mins approx, Icon
LANGUAGE Spanish
COVER QUOTE 'Without doubt the sexiest movie you'll see this year' - Uncut
WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Y tu mamá también was intended to be sexually provocative: a booklet included with a special DVD release in the UK explains that the president of production at Good Machine films, Ted Hope, approached Cuarón to take part in their 'Uncensored' project, to make explicit movies classified NC-17 in the States. 'In the process we wondered if we were explicit enough or if we needed to go further, something that we realised went against the nature of the characters and story,' the director notes.
THE PLOT High-school graduates Julio and Tenoch are left to their own devices when their girlfriends go travelling for the summer; at a wedding they meet Luisa, the Spanish wife of one of Tenoch's relatives, Jano. For a lark they suggest a trip to a fictional beach, 'Heaven's Mouth'; at first Luisa declines, but after a visit to her doctor and a drunken phonecall from her husband, who admits to an affair, she agrees to join the boys. The journey reveals plenty of home truths among the trio, culminating in sex between all three. The boys return to the city without Luisa.
THE FILM Despite its reputation as a beautiful, sexy, art-house film, Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también has a social conscience. Nor is death ever very far away, for that matter. A soundtrack featuring the likes of Señor Coconut and Brian Eno is brutally interrupted by a narrator who, when he is not filling in details of the central characters' backgrounds, recounts the lives of figures the trio meet on their journey: the migrant bricklayer who is killed on a motorway taking a shortcut that saves him a two-mile walk every day; the fate of the fisherman they befriend late on, whose livelihood is taken away from him by coastal hotel developments until he is reduced to working as a janitor to support his family; or the 23 pigs who escape from a ranch, 14 of whom are slaughtered within two months.
Even Emmanuel Lubezki's camera is distracted, wandering into the kitchen at a café where the characters have stopped; an elderly woman begins a jerking, shrugging dance as if she's in a David Lynch movie. It is reminiscent of Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), another feature film with Gael García Bernal and a documentary feel, though Y tu mamá is a good deal less heavyhanded, therefore way more successful.
Julio and Tenoch face a summer of smoking dope and wanking at the swimming pool. It's the sort of season where they miss their chance of participating in an orgy - a friend scores his first experience of group sex at a party - but they've gone home early. So when sensual married Spaniard Luisa takes them up on an invite to a fictitious beach, they hustle to make it happen.
While the ostensible reason for Luisa agreeing to join these boys 10 years her junior is her husband's admission that he has slept with someone else, it turns out that he is a serial adulterer and she has long tolerated his affairs in the hope he will change. Luisa has been diagnosed with terminal cancer; she decides to stay with the fisherman's family they befriend at the end of the film and dies one month later.
You might question whether writers Alfonso and Carlos Cuarón had to put a death sentence on their heroine for her to be allowed to cut loose but its revelation is truly poignant. After all, why else would she want to hang out with two boys of whom she says: 'You play with babies you end up washing diapers.'
Sharing dope initially opens up the trio's sexual histories, and it turns out they're as inexperienced as each other, including Luisa. The love of her life was killed in a motorcycle accident at the same age the boys are now; she fell for Jano, who enriches her sexual experience with tips brought back from his conquests. 'You ever wiggle your finger up the ass?' she asks, in a very different take on that refrain familiar from Jonathan Glazer's terrifying gangster flick Sexy Beast (2000). (Splitting up with Jano, Luisa leaves various advice on their formerly shared answering machine, including this priceless tip on his dry cleaner: 'Don't go there any more, they ruin your clothes.')
Nor is her role to widen the boys' experience: masters of the swift fuck, the sex she has with each of them is no better, however much she may pity their luckless girlfriends. After fucking Tenoch she feels she has upset the balance in the 'inseparable entity' that is the boys' relationship and decides it's up to her to set things right by having sex with Julio. She has misread her place in their ménage à trois: the boys have discovered that they have slept with each other's girlfriends.
In the fury that follows, the social differences between Julio and Tenoch are accentuated: Tenoch the son of a government minister, given his Aztec-inspired name to curry electoral favour; Julio labelled a social climber who, it turns out, has never got over seeing his mother in the arms of his godfather.
Once such truths have been spoken, and the boys kiss in the heady climactic scene, things cannot return to how they were: Julio and Tenoch are no longer in touch. Their girlfriends come back from Europe and dump them; the pair prepare for university. One day they bump into each other, with Julio tellingly dressed like a preppy, and agree to go for a coffee because it's easier than making an excuse not to; it is here Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa is dead. The best friends never see each other again.
KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 0:22 The film sets out its stall immediately: Tenoch and his grifriend Ana are having frenzied sex in her bedroom, beneath a giant poster for Harold and Maude; Julio isn't so welcome in girlfriend Cecilia's home, but when he's called to help her look for her passport, she frantically tugs down her tracksuit bottoms and again sex is very quick.
Chapter 11, 50:39 Tenoch goes to Luisa's bedroom to borrow shampoo. She asks him to take off the towel he's wearing and to go down on her; sex is very quick.
Chapter 12 1:01:50 Luisa joins Julio in the back of the car and they start to have sex; Tenoch pulls over but tries to watch. Sex is very quick.
Chapter 17, 1:28:07 After a drunken evening at an outdoor bar, the three go back to their hut together: Luisa strips and fellates Julio and Tenoch; the boys kiss. I've often wondered if the crucial moment in this scene, when she goes down on them, is panned and scanned as the shot doesn't seem as balanced as the rest of the film.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT To the surprise of many, Alfonso Cuarón was chosen to direct the third instalment in the hugely popular boy-wizard franchise - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - and a great success the decision proved. Notably, he created an unnerving atmosphere, which helped pushed the series in a more adult direction. Alfonso also executive produced his son Jonás Cuarón's directorial debut, Año Uña (2007).
Año Uña is remarkable in that it's told in still photographs; very loosely it shares themes of a (slightly) older woman attracted to a younger boy, and vice versa, and also social reflections of the relationship, here between the United States and Mexico. A young American girl, Molly (Eireann Harper), flirts with the even younger Diego while on holiday in Mexico; he takes her up on an only half-intended invitation to visit her in New York.
KEY QUOTE 'What you really want is to fuck each other' - Luisa
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