Y TU MAMÁ
TAMBIÉN
At first this raw but sly Mexican comedy might make you wonder what the Spanish
word for Porky's is, or wonder whether the film shouldn't have been
titled Mexican Pie. But the Harold & Maude poster above the
two naked high-schoolers energetically screwing in the opening shot, not to
mention the arch voiceover narrator that intrudes at key moments à la
Truffaut's Jules and Jim, suggests that director Alfonso
Cuarón had more in mind than parodying crass Hollywood teensploitation.
True, Tenoch (Diego Luna), scion of a corrupt nouveau riche, and Julio (Gael
García Bernal), a raffish middle-class kid, share the occasional fart
joke and masturbatory fantasy, but they have a bit more grit, taste, and
imagination than their north-of-the-border celluloid contemporaries. So it's
not impossible to believe that stunning Luisa (Maribel Verdu), the Spanish
bride of Tenoch's prissy and adulterous cousin, might agree to join them on a
trip to a beach called "The Mouth of Heaven."
The beach does not exist, but the Mexico along the way does, a catalogue of
indelible characters and places put in sociological context by the omniscient
voiceover. And the erotic tension among the three erupts in a ménage as
startling in its dynamics as it is in its raunchy spontaneity. Much more about
class, transience, desire, desperation, and mortality than about horny
adolescents getting it on, Y tu mamá también nonetheless
succumbs to that trademark Hollywood device -- punishing the characters for our
guilt at vicariously enjoying their satisfaction. At the Avon.
Issue Date: May 10 - 16, 2002
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