...the film is not quite all it pretends to be with its dour ending. But it does provide along the way enough humor and enough clear perceptions about growing up to make the journey worthwhile.
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Tenoch and Julio are best friends who have just graduated from high school. As the movie opens we see their preoccupation with making love to their girlfriends, smoking pot, and using as much profanity as they can squeeze into every sentence. They are Mexican but they are not unlike many boys their age throughout the world. How they change and mature over the course of the summer is the subject of this 2002 coming-of-age comedy, "Y Tu Mama Tamien" ("And Your Mother, Too"), from director Alfonso Cuaron ("A Little Princess," "Great Expectations").
The movie is very graphic sexually, starting with a consecutive pair of lovemaking scenes that help earn it its "unrated" status. Language, too, in English subtitles, is filled with obscenities, and there is abundant nudity, full frontal, both male and female. But I'd suggest staying with the film, even if you're on the prudish side. The laughs it generates are more pointed and meaningful than those in similarly inspired Hollywood efforts like "Road Trip." Not that you'll find any deep, psychological answers to the human condition here; the film is not quite all it pretends to be with its dour ending. But it does provide along the way enough humor and enough clear perceptions about growing up to make the journey worthwhile.
It's a boring summer for the two boys, played by Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. Tenoch, born of privilege, lives with his well-educated and politically connected parents in a lavish home that Julio, born of the middle class, enjoys visiting. The days go by uneventfully for them after their girlfriends fly off to travel in Europe, and they await the start of college in a partying, pot-smoking, sex-obsessed lifestyle of which their parents are blissfully unaware. Then they meet Luisa Cortes (Maribel Verdu), the wife of Tenoch's cousin. She is feeling rejected by her husband and apparently unfulfilled as a person, partially explaining why she accepts an invitation from the boys to go off with them on a lengthy journey to a mythical, secluded beach. The boys borrow a car, pick her up, and promptly get lost. The journey becomes the movie, both literally and figuratively.
The boys are childish and innocent, despite their gross language and sexual activity. They're eighteen, but they act twelve, punching and kicking and horsing around, playing fart jokes on one another. The actors are so unaffected, so natural in their parts, you'd swear they weren't acting at all. Luisa, beautiful, worldly wise, slender yet amply endowed, becomes both a lover and a mother figure to Tenoch and Julio, and the wild back roads of Mexico become metaphors of the young people's perilous sexual and emotional odyssey of self discovery.
The movie is humorous and serious at the same time, a lighthearted, risqué romp with dramatic overtones. It is also an uncompromising view of youth and youthful vitality and enthusiasm, as well as a story of Luisa and her own human needs. For so brief and seemingly carefree a movie, it packs in a few good pearls of wisdom. But as I've said, I wouldn't go so far as to suggest it's a world-beating film; many of its insights are fairly obvious and easy to see coming. The jealousy that develops between the two boys, for instance: "Play with babies and you'll end up washing diapers," says Luisa.
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