Y Tu Mamá
También
(And Your Mother Too) is an exceptionally honest
coming-of-age road film about two 17-year old Mexican boys
experiencing a rite of passage we probably all experience in one
way or another during that magical time of burgeoning adulthood.
It captures that time in such a vivid way that the feeling we
come away with is of life lived on the edge. Joy is more
vibrant; sorrow more bleak; the lessons learned about life and
friendship are poignant and penetrating.
The
characters experiences test their views of life, friendship, sex
and death, all within a colorful and ever-changing Mexican
background full of social upheaval and political demonstrations.
They have nothing to do with the plot and yet are an essential
ingredient of También’s success. Visually, it is
wonderfully rich, the colors and lighting only increasing the
impact of the film.
The
opening goes straight to the main focus of teenage life with
separate scenes of Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia
Bernal) having the kind of rapid sex young boys tend to have
with their girlfriends before they go on holiday. The former is
the privileged son of a corrupt politician and a new-age mother
who cleans auras, while the latter is from far more humble
stock, his mother working as a secretary while his sister is a
university student and civil-rights activist.
The two
friends share the same interests – sex, jerking-off, drugs and a
reluctance to study or take much seriously. Tenoch wants to be a
writer, but is easily distracted, and they are both members of a
group called Charlolastros, or “spiritual cowboys,” whose
manifesto is more flippant than anything. It’s also of little
importance to them that it’s easily broken. Yet, they’re shocked
at how big the hurt is when one of these erstwhile tenets are
indeed broken, though each has held himself above the need to
conform to restraint on their natural own hedonism.
During a
wedding, the two meet 28-year old Luisa (Maribel Verdú), a
mysterious Spanish beauty from Madrid. Openly drawn by her
serene sexuality and confidence, in jocular fashion they invent
a hidden destination to which they want to take her called
‘Heaven’s Mouth’. More than matching the boys’ eager grasping of
life, but with more humor and patience borne of the decade
difference in their ages, she seems to agree to their youthful
agenda. Luisa jokes along when her husband, Tenoch’s pretentious
cousin Jano (Juan Carlos Remolina), interrupts them.
Some days
later, Luisa is devastated by two separate pieces of bad news,
one of which is regards Jano’s infidelity while he is away on a
business trip. Needing a distraction she contacts Tenoch to take
the boys up on their offer. When leaving her home, the camera
stays behind in the empty apartment and watches her from an open
upstairs window as she gets into the car with the boys. It’s a
moment that allows for a curious sense of ‘something other’
going on, the room feeling like a lonelier place without her.
Director
Alfonso Cuarón, along with long-time cinematographic
collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, have departed from the visual
style of their previous triumph Great Expectations in
that here there are few close-ups or individual points of view.
We see the action unfold objectively, as observers. In fact,
just as an observer sometimes gets diverted from the main focus,
the camera occasionally gets pulled away to look at something
other than the main story. Things such as peasants along the
roadside being harassed by militia, a seemingly silent and
majestic shrine or a herd of feral pigs all come into focus.
More
frequently employed is an additional distancing technique where
the soundtrack is silenced and the voice of the narrator, aloof
and impartial, records details about those with whom our trio
tangentially interacts. A sense of perspective is gained that
this hot, intensely lived short period of time is a few precious
moments intersecting on a continuum of several lives.
Luna and
Bernal are exceptional as the two testosterone driven boys.
Cuarón maneuvers them so lightly and adroitly that they show
exuberance in the most natural of ways. As for Verdú, she is as
potent a sexual siren as I have seen.
As the
three leave Mexico City, an ambulance blocking the road tending
to the covered corpse of a construction worker delays them from
their journey briefly. Similarly, this road becomes infinitely
more meaningful for having been the scene, ten years earlier, of
another fatal accident, a grieving woman kneeling over her dead
child in the dirt surrounded by broken and bloody chickens in
overturned crates. The theme of the fragility of life and the
certainty of mortality surfaces and underscores También
in its headlong rush of passion and the abandonment to carefree
indulgence and the instinctive moth-to-a-candle pleasure of
youth.
Along the
way their car breaks down and they are obliged to spend the
night in a motel. When Julio and Tenoch creep along the corridor
to spy into her room as she undresses they are sobered and
confounded by the sight of her racked with sobs. Not
understanding her heartbreak or the reason for it, they silently
creep away. When separate interactions between Luisa and each of
the boys causes a major blow-up between them, she puts her foot
down. “When you play with babies,” she fumes, “you end up
changing diapers!”
Threatening to leave unless they abide by her rules, she takes
on the role of an erotic educator initiating them into deeper
and deeper levels of intimacy. On her own, she experiences
unknown depths of pain and grief. But when with the boys, Luisa
shows no trace of it, bestowing a sensual gift the value of
which they will not know until later in their lives. Each
interaction is an expansion into receiving gifts, seemingly from
life itself. They find that in this playtime suspended from the
rat race, life itself directs the shots.
They meet
a fisherman and his young family who offer to sell them food, as
well as take them on a boat tour of the beaches. Astonishingly,
they find one called Heaven’s Mouth and it all magically fits in
with the rarefied level of heady profligacy Luisa is showing
them. Cradling the fisherman’s child on her lap brings a deep
tide of sadness to Luisa. “Float like a dead person,” she tells
a child as she supports her floating in the sea, the camera
going underwater in another moment of pause to see from another
perspective.
Breasting
the waves herself, Luisa’s inner voice, full of love and wisdom,
is heard. “Life is like the surf.” she says, “When you give
yourself, give like the waves.
