Intermission: Leap Year

Director Michael Rowe was inspired to write Leap Year, which is out this Friday, by a story he was told 'about a conservative woman who'd accepted a sadomasochistic relationship in order to keep her lover from leaving.' Laura (Monica Del Carmen) is a freelance business journalist: her day is made up of ringing editors for work ('30 tips to take advantage of the economic crisis'), carrying the can when things go wrong, eating, cleaning (the fridge), reading (Erich Fromm), wanking. She's also alone: a ring on her hand and picture by her bedside may hint at a man in her life but she pretends to family and one-night stands she has a full time seeing friends, going out and eating well, when she's mooching around in her pyjamas scoffing something from a tin.

Set in Mexico, Leap Year portrays a very different life to that of Y tu mamá también's spoiled brats, rather Laura could be a grown-up daughter of the indigenous couple at the centre of Battle in Heaven. Australian Rowe has lived in Mexico for 16 years and says he has an outsider's perspective on Mexican society, though the Spanish-language film is very much an inside job: other than views from the window, his camera never leaves Laura's flat. This is Rear Window without the repressed sexuality; Laura masturbates watching the next-door couple performing mundane tasks.

Laura misses their intimacy, which she finds in Arturo, a man who takes sly interest in her while dealing out beatings. Their sex progresses in the manner of the couple in Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, through throttling and pissing to knives. Initially submissive, Laura strips ready for sex every time Arturo appears, like Cécilia in L'ennui. Throughout the film Laura crosses off the days of her February calendar; she takes control of the relationship towards the end of this leap-year month - it could be called 29 Days Later.

Battle in Heaven: Flag bearer

DIRECTED BY Carlos Reygadas, 2005

STARRING Marcos Hernández (Marcos), Anapola Mushkadiz (Ana), Bertha Ruiz (Marcos' wife)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex

RUN TIME 94 mins approx, Tartan

LANGUAGE Spanish

COVER QUOTE 'Beautiful and utterly compelling. Carlos Reygadas makes films like no one else in modern cinema' - Esquire

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Director Reygadas provoked controversy with his intergenerational sex scene in debut movie Japón (2002) which featured a non-professional cast. The posters for Battle in Heaven have the very beautiful Anapola Mushkadiz lying naked to her waist on a bed, which is surrounded by clouds. Much was made of the movie's 'real' sex scenes.

THE PLOT Marcos, a chauffeur for an army general, is sent to meet his employer's daughter, Ana, at the airport and takes her to the high-class, suburban brothel where she works. She tells him to come in for sex with one of her colleagues but it emerges that he wants to have sex with Ana. She spots that he is out of sorts and he admits that he and his wife kidnapped a baby who died. His wife fears that he will give everything away but Marcos promises Ana that he will give himself up to the police. Before he does so he visits Ana at her boyfriend's flat; Marcos leaves but then returns and stabs her. He joins a religious procession on his knees and has a sack placed over his head; blood emerges and he collapses in the Basilica.

THE FILM Despite visual and structural differences, Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven shares several themes with Y tu mamá tambien, by his Mexican compatriot, Alfonso Cuarón. Both films have an interest in the urban landscape of Mexico City - plenty of shots of its streets - sexuality and class, though only Reygadas goes so far as to explicitly mix the last two themes.

In Battle in Heaven's central scene, middle-aged chauffeur Marcos sleeps with his young charge, Ana, the daughter of his boss. Their relationship doesn't just transgress class and age boundaries but, as Ana points out, Marcos has known Ana for 15 years, since she was a child.

In the manner the camera sometimes goes for a wander in Cuarón's film, it does so here, scanning across neighbourhood rooftops, showing aerial repairmen at work, the city's skyline, and a dripping tap, before returning to the bedroom and a shot of the couple's genitals. The couple are tender with each other after sex: Ana's hand inches over to take that of the older man, her servant.

Reygadas had known Marcos Hernández, who plays Marcos, as he had worked as a driver for 30 years at Mexico's ministry of culture, where Reygadas' father worked. The thickset woman playing Marcos's wife, Bertha Ruiz, is the wife of a regional police commander. Her husband's only concern was that her sex scene be simulated. Reygadas is essentially transferring Catherine Breillat's filmic philosophy to central American and, indeed, extending it, through his casting of non-professionals.

The BBFC certificate for Battle in Heaven warns that it includes 'real' sex scenes and much of the pre-release hype focused on that. But the scenes, though more explicit than most in cinema (for instance, the blow jobs that bookend the film, or the shot of Ana's genitals), are not so explicit that they are definitely real. The BBFC ends up in a strange position here, advising viewers that convincing sex scenes are authentic, though they may be simulated (there's no reason a prosthesis couldn't be used for the blow job scenes).

There is a spiritual side to Reygadas' film that's more obvious than that in Y tu mamá también. When Marcos first sees the pilgrims whose procession he later joins, he is at a petrol station where the blaring classical music seems to have sent him into a fugue state. 'What do you think?' asks the mechanic, as he checks the oil. 'They're all sheep,' Marcos says. 'I was talking about the car,' comes the succinct reply.

Slowly Marcos' attitude changes: in bed with his wife he stares at a portrait of Jesus.
His wife urges Marcos not to give himself up but, if he is determined, to at least wait one more day so they can join the pilgrimage: 'Something special is going to happen,' she says, 'Something's going to change.' As it is, the extra day is the one on which he murders Ana, provoking a police hunt. Marcos' son reveals the location of the dead body of the baby that was kidnapped while his wife is taken to the procession to help spot her husband. (The policeman in charge of the operation looks and acts like a Mexican Takeshi Kitano, if you can imagine.)

When all the celebrants have left the Basilica, Marcos' wife is given permission to enter first to find her husband. Her husband's body is kneeling in a pew, a blood-soaked bag over his head. She reaches out to touch his shoulder and his body slumps to the floor. It starts to rain, and the next scene is of men trying to ring the massive church bell, though no sound is heard on the soundtrack.

This is followed by a recurrent scene in the movie, of soldiers either raising or lowering a giant Mexican flag, a ceremony Marcos has followed religiously in the past. It is accompanied by loud military music, and other scenes have very loud music, for instance Bach at the garage or Tavener's The Protecting Veil. It serves as jolting a purpose as the voiceover in Y tu mamá también.

It's possible to think of the opening scene, where Ana fellates Marcos, as Marcos' fantasy. Its repetition at the film's end hints at something else made manifest - a meeting in heaven, or Marcos' dying dream?

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 00:40 A sweaty, middle-aged man, Marcos, with a combover and paedo glasses is shown getting a blow job from an equally naked young woman, Ana, against a grey backdrop. The camera tracks down his standing body and then round her kneeling figure till we're facing her; a tear trickles down one cheek.

Chapter 7, 37:07 Marcos is shown having sex with his hefty wife from behind. As she kneels on the bed he regards her back and an icon of the wounded Christ on their bedroom wall.

Chapter 9, 48:18 Ana is riding Marcos naked in bed; as they have sex the camera moves out the window and tacks across the skyline before returning to the couple. She gets off him and, as they lie side by side, the camera shows her pussy.

Chapter 15, 1:29:36 Ana is again shown giving Marcos a blow job in the space with the grey backdrop. Both are noticeably more relaxed and happier; they say that they love each other.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Reygadas went on to make the beautiful, mystical Silent Light (2007), set among the Mexico's Mennonite community. A fan of Carl Theodor Dreyer's work from his time as a potential film student in Brussels, Reygadas borrows the ending to the Danish director's film Ordet (1955). There are again the everyday sex scenes he likes to show, amidst another cast of non-professionals.

KEY QUOTE 'What you really want is to fuck me, right, Marcos?' - Ana

BONUS CURIO (A Brush with Nipples, Part III) Mushkadiz's hair extends wildly for the cover of the US DVD (in the UK, the film's title was emblazoned over her chest):

Y tu mamá también: Mexican road trip

DIRECTED BY Alfonso Cuarón, 2001

STARRING 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