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copyright ©1999-2002
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Best friends Tenoch and Julio
are seventeen and carefree, working hard to enjoy the long days of doing
absolutely nothing during this one last summer of their youth. They’ve
just graduated from high school, and their girlfriends have taken off
for a trip to Europe, leaving the boys home alone with plenty of free
time on their hands. This they divide between getting high at the
palatial home of wealthy Tenoch’s family – his dad is a corrupt
high-ranking government official -- sneaking in for a swim at the local
country club when it’s supposed to be closed for maintenance, and
talking about all the girls with whom they’re planning to score (but
won’t). In short, life’s a little dull, until they meet lovely
Spanish-born Luisa at a family wedding. Luisa’s a good deal older than
the boys, and the wife of Tenoch’s pretentious writer cousin Jano, but
neither fact stops the boys from trying to convince her to join them on
a spontaneous trip to a secluded, legendary (and possibly non-existent)
strip of perfect beach called Heaven’s Mouth. Their offer is declined
at first, for all the obvious reasons, but when a few days later, Luisa
receives a drunken late-night phone call from her no-good husband – in
which he tearfully confesses that he’s just cheated on her – she
makes the sudden decision to give Tenoch and Julio a ring. Soon, the
unlikely trio find themselves taking off on a crazy five-day road trip
towards the coast.
Review
There’s a lot of nudity and a lot of sex in Alfonso Cuaron’s
bawdy, erotic, teen comedy-drama, Y Tu Mamá También. And we’re
not talking prim and proper Hollywood sex either, where private parts
stay carefully hidden behind strategically placed objects in the
foreground, and everything’s shot in dim, soft, romantic lighting
designed expressly to give viewers a vague sense of what’s going on,
without letting them see much of anything specific at all. No, the sex
in Y Tu Mamá También is raw, graphic and frank (as is much of
the banter between Luisa and the boys) and in a different film,
certainly, one might be inclined to dismiss it as exploitative or
gratuitous. But this is not porn. Sex is an integral part of one of the
movie’s main themes, the joy of living; it’s the celebration of the
intimate emotional connections that individuals learn to form with each
other as they travel through life. When Luisa teaches the boys about how
to please a woman, it’s not just about sex – she’s giving them a
life lesson in the importance of thinking about the needs of the people
around you, caring for others besides yourself. On an even deeper level,
Cuaron’s movie is as much a coming-of-age flick about his native
country as it is about the two boys at the story’s center: as we
travel from the affluent, urbanized, environs that the boys inhabit to
the nowhere towns and tiny villages that lead to the coast, we see and
learn (through chance encounters and voiceover narration) bits and
pieces of Mexico as it was, as it is, and as it will be. What I like
about Y Tu Mamá También is that it takes standard American
Hollywood movie elements that could easily have become cliché – the
road trip of lost innocence, the seductive older woman – and creates
something that feels fresh and original and very firmly rooted in the
realities of modern Mexico, giving us a glimpse into a culture that many
of us Americans know little about, despite our geographic proximity. —reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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