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Y Tu Mamá También

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There are so many self-consciously ingratiating things about Y Tu Mamá También ("And Your Mother, Too," or "So's Your Mother") that it isn't long before its minimal charm begins to wear very thin. As written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón­ whose AIDS comedy Solo Con Tu Pareja was both surprising and lovely­ Y Tu Mamá También is a Mexican adolescent-boy-road-movie that is filled with sex and hijinks, that ultimately betrays itself with a sentimental ending.

The plot at first seems to be just a retread of Dude, Where's My Car. Two best-friend-teen boys­ the upper-class Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna) and the lower-middle-class Julio Zapata (Gael García Bernal)­ have the summer off from their girlfriends who have skipped off to Europe. They spend their time getting stoned, jerking off-together on the diving board of a local country club, and generally causing trouble. They seem incredibly fond of one another, and while undercurrents of homoeroticism spark between them, they appear to be determinably heterosexual. At a family wedding they meet Luisa Cortés (Maribel Verdú), Tenoch's cousin's Spanish wife, and after some silly flirting they invite her to go on a trip with them to a fabulous beach called "Boca del Cielo" (Heaven's Mouth), which they have invented. The slightly older, but far more sophisticated, young woman shrugs them off. But when her husband drunkenly admits to an affair she decides to bolt the marriage and go on the road with her young admirers. At this point Dude, Where My Car turns into Jules and Jim, but this move doesn't elevate the film as much as weights it down with cultural baggage it can't carry.

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Just as Catherine­ the sublime Jeanne Moreau­ in Jules and Jim becomes the central narrative figure and takes control of the male characters' lives, the more worldly Luisa becomes a mentor to her younger friends. The boys keep getting hard-ons and giggling about it. She flirts with them and has sex with one and then the other. She tells them how to be better lovers (both boys get so excited that they come in about 90 seconds), and how to introduce ass-play into love-making. While Jeanne Moreau's Catherine never talked about fingering assholes, in Jules and Jim we always knew that she was far more knowledgeable about sex than her two lovers. Emotional skirmishes flair up when Julio and Tenoch discover that they have slept with one another's girlfriends, whereupon Luisa gets fed up and decides that she's going to make the rules. Director Cuarón fills the emptiness with narrative commentaries and observations about Mexican politics, class struggles, and labor problems.

After few days and adventures on the road, the trio finally does accidentally find "Boca del Cielo"­ and here the movie tips its hand. After a day amid the beautiful scenery­ about to be appropriated by developers the narrative voice informs us­ the event we've actually been waiting for arrives with drunken evening passion. Obsessed with the boys' erotic relationship all along, the film ends just when it's getting to the point of it. It gets worse: after they awake naked together, the next morning they are deeply uncomfortable. Luisa stays and the boys go back to Mexico City. In a short epilogue we find out their fates.

For most of the film, director Cuarón presents us with what is ostensibly a story about the joys­ and the incipient scariness­ of sexual discovery. But the ending casts a whole new light on this. If we had known what happens all along, it would have made a more compelling narrative and would cast Luisa as the central protagonist. By withholding this information, Luisa becomes nothing more than a plot devise­ someone to blow the boys when they discover their true attraction to one another. This, of course, is what the film has been about all along, and what it has also been avoiding.

It is telling that while Cuarón has no problem showing us explicit heterosexual activity, he fades out after the kiss and cuts quickly to the "morning after." Afraid to pursue its own (obvious) obsessions, the "shocking" kiss (most straight audiences gasp) and the deletion of any male-male lovemaking is a throwback to 20 years ago. The film cloaks, and plays hide-and-seek with its homoeroticism in an unsavory manner. Unlike Dude, Where's My Car­ which is more honest in the erotic relationship between its male protagonists­ or Jules and Jim­ which treats the character of Catherine with great respect and not as a quirky plot twist­ Y Tu Mamá También has neither the courage of its own sexual preoccupations, nor the intelligence to know what it is doing.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com