Y tu mamá también (Cuarón, 2001)

Conventional wisdom tells us that to make a serious movie, you must have serious characters. Y tu mamá también flippantly dismisses this rule in the same way its two obnoxious, immature protagonists flippantly dismiss everything else.

These protagonists are Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna), two Mexican teenagers bent on getting high and getting laid. When their girlfriends depart to Italy for the summer, the two best friends are bored out of their minds, resorting to whacking off in the swimming pool.

At a family wedding, the boys meet Luisa (Maribel Verdú), a beautiful, older Spanish woman married to Tenoch’s arrogant prick of cousin. (Such a characterization would aptly describe Julio and Tenoch as well.) On a lark, they flirt with Luisa by asking her to a fictional beach called Heaven’s Mouth. When she unexpectedly accepts, the threesome departs on an improvised road trip, rife with juvenile jokes and rowdy sex.

If Y tu mamá también is sounding like American Pie: Mexican Road Trip Edition, it isn’t. Yes, it begins with the teenagers having sex with their girlfriends. Yes, there are two fart jokes in the first ten minutes. Yes, there are enough sex, drugs, and swears for a very naughty teen movie. But Y tu mamá también is, after all, a “serious” film. A serious film that treats its immature characters with not disdain but care, and chronicles life’s gritty realities through a distant but perceptive lens.

Although there are three physical characters on the road trip—Luisa, Julio, and Tenoch—there is a fourth character built from the roving camera and omniscient narration. The script, written by director Alfonso Cuarón and his brother Carlos Cuarón, is much keener than its characters. As Julio casually complains about the bad traffic, the camera meanders aside to find a covered corpse, and the narrator tells us the man was killed because he had no choice but to cross the busy street to get to work. Throughout the film, the camera wanders off the road into one of those poignant tangents, abandoning our characters for a brief moment to remind us of the world outside their insular lives. Director Cuarón does a deft job with juggling relationship of his three main characters and the film’s greater ambitions. The almost blasé manner of social and political commentary—the narration simply tells, it never judges—gives Y tu mamá también a weight that never seems laden with pretension. After all, Julio and Tenoch themselves could care less about the dead man.

Luisa, played magnificently by Verdú, is the anchor of the film as the older, wiser woman. She has her own mysterious reasons for going on the road trip, reasons that Julio and Tenoch would not understand even if they knew. It is Luisa with whom the audience sympathizes while laughing at the clumsiness of the boys in their attempts to woo her. Even with their shameless immaturity, Julio and Tenoch become almost endearing in their own pathetic manner. Although such a road trip should bring two best friends closer, the teenagers drift and jolt apart. When they finally reach Heaven’s Mouth, they are no longer friends, and by the end of the movie, they are certainly no longer boys.

Y tu mamá también is indeed a road trip movie with lots of sex and nudity, but it is so much more. What makes it memorable is not the immediate punch of brazen sexuality or pulsing energy, but its lingering and haunting sadness.