Two adolescent friends go on a road trip during their summer holiday with an older, beautiful cousin-in-law. Tackling supposedly flippant topics like teenage lust alongside life, society, meaning and death, Cuaron crafts a sublime masterpiece that can hold its head up high in any company. Brazen, fresh and gorgeous.
Try to imagine the Jean-Luc Godard of Week-End being brought in to work on a Road Trip or American Pie script, and you'll get something of the flavour of this jalapeno... more >
Try to imagine the Jean-Luc Godard of Week-End being brought in to work on a Road Trip or American Pie script, and you'll get something of the flavour of this jalapeno-hot Mexican road movie, written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron.
It starts with a bang. Two bangs in fact, as lusty young bucks Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) grant their girlfriends one farewell fuck apiece before the girls head off to the airport for a summer in Europe and the boys depart with their cousin's bored, beautiful wife Luisa (Maribel Verdu) in search of an idyllic beach that may or may not exist.
There's been a lot of controversy of late over the number of real sex scenes and actual erections sprouting up in arthouse releases, but a major surprise in Y Tu Mama Tambien, given the perpetually priapic state of its principals, is that there aren't more of them. The script carefully distinguishes how each character uses sex, though: for Julio and Tenoch, it's merely a way to assuage (often all too quickly) their throbbing teenage hormones, but for Luisa, sex is a balm to smooth over the painful cracks in her life.
Actually, the film's route isn't dissimilar to Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation, where a woman served chiefly to bring out the underlying tensions between two men, but Cuaron is more interested in this woman than Araki was in Rose McGowan. Verdu's is a fantastic, double-edged performance, having to be sexy enough to fulfil other people's idea of a fantasy woman while sad enough to suggest how unfulfilled she is in her own life. It's almost too facile a comparison to make, but in so far as she occupies the same position in this film - the object of adolescent lust - as Amy Smart in Road Trip or Shannon Elizabeth in American Pie, Verdu shows those actresses up for the mere girls they are.
By placing Luisa at its heart, Tambien establishes itself, very quickly, as a film with darknesses under its bright young eyes. The camera keeps drifting off from the fart and spunk gags let off inside the protagonists' car to the more important business passing by the windows: peasants conducting pageants at the roadside, or dead on the road itself, the victims of exploitation, poverty and police brutality. Julio, Tenoch and Luisa - having a fine old time between them - barely seem to notice it, but we do, and that's the real world, cruel and beautiful, Cuaron seems to be getting at, a world far from the fantasy of the movies.
There have been a lot of teen-oriented pics with male leads stressing how hard it is to get dates, but relatively few - Amy Heckerling's box-office loser Loser was a commendable recent exception - that acknowledge how hard it is to get anywhere in the world without money. In the movies, most American teenagers appear affluent enough to go anywhere and do anything without too much trouble, but Tambien's teens have believable (and contrasting) social backgrounds; Cuaron knows that in Julio and Tenoch's lives, there won't be a money-making sequel.
It's an old, old message, but rarely this energetically expressed: you only get one shot at life, best enjoy it while you can. The great joy of Y Tu Mama Tambien is that it's more than enjoyable enough to be an essential part of the ride.
