Y Tu Mama Tambien
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Movie Reviews of Y Tu Mama Tambien
Movie Review: a moment in time, like a photograph....
Summary: 5 Stars
Y Tu Mama Tambien is a great film. The direction is snappy, heartfelt, natural, beautiful, and as the film goes on, what may seem like a simple story, a light-hearted road-trip, becomes something more, something which takes on a life of its own and transforms the mundane into something exceptional.The three main characters, two sexually charged but well-meaning 17 year old boys, and a 28 year old woman dealing with the potential crumbling of her marriage, among other things, come together in a realistic intersection of excitement, tragedy, and lust as they embark on a spur-of-the moment road trip vacation, heading across the gorgeous Mexican landscape on their meandering way to a mystical, beautiful beach called "Heaven's Mouth," which may or may not exist. (The boys, each smitten with the stunning twenty-something woman they have found themselves introduced to, have hastily patched-together the 'trip' (they had no such trip planned, but, as young people so often do, they put it together in no time flat, their spontaneity completely intact) as a chance to spend some time with the woman, though the real occurence of their intentions with her (romance?) is at best tenuous as they embark, considering she is married to the uncle of one, and is quite a bit older, in a different stage of life, to say the least. She is the slightly world-weary adult. This intrigues them, adds a level of mystery to her that their current same-age girlfriends somehow do not have. The film works in part by painting their desires and curiosities against hers. They are looking to her (perhaps without realizing it?) in some way for answers to questions in their lives, for what comes next, plus her experience (sexual and otherwise) must also intrigue them. For her, facing a crossroads in her life herself, they perhaps represent a lost freedom and innocence that she may want to reclaim for a time. Beyond all this too, this semi-seriousness, is the fact that each of them just wants to have a little fun. To have an escape, perhaps. From the familiar, from decisions (should she stay with her philandering husband? What career should the two boys choose? Should they stay with their girlfriends etc?), from familial obligations and for the two young men, from parental 'supervision' and influence.
The plot of the film, or what carries it along, is the fact that of course there are two of them, so the question is how could any romance between either one of them and her work? This 'plot' somehow in the end comes second to something else, something more bittersweet and nostalgic, a depiction of three lives at a moment in time so realistic it is almost uncanny.
Simply put, the three take a "trip" together, in more than one meaning of the word, and much as in life, once the period of time in their lives is over, neither of the three will be the same. The things they think, feel and do, the things they say to one another, their interactions, as well as the things they see on their way, the way little slivers of the lives around them on their travel get picked up by the three, and the viewers, by a sort of osmosis, make up the larger 'picture' here. The film itself at the beginning is like a pencil sketch, with the beautiful watercolor pigments slowly being brought in, one by one, as the moments go by, until, as the film ends, there is this full painting, framed and silent, that is worth a thousand words somehow.
What is it about the freedom inherent in these Mexican and Spanish and other foreign films that is so delicious? Whatever it is, the amorphous loose and languid quality is in full force here, to good effect.
Featuring some truly fantastic acting, great directing, music and locations, y Tu Mama Tambien is a stunner of a film, and I highly recommend it.
Speaking generally, the filmmakers here nail that amorphous 'something' that translates what could have been just another movie into movie-making magic. If you liked this film, seek out Sex and Lucia, from Spain. Each carries within it a world worthy of checking out and staying for a while, and, though S&L contains more fantastical fictionalistic elements, and YTMT is more of a reality-based, reality-feeling (almost documentary-feeling at some points), they both reveal what is magic about film-making, that indefinable "It." Looking forward to more by all three main actors, Maribel Verdú,
Gael García Bernal, and Diego Luna. Enjoy!.....
Movie Review: 2 guys, a girl and a great new film.
Summary: 5 Stars
Alfonso Cuaron follows his two fine and individual literary adaptations - 'The Little Princess', 'Great Expectations' - with a modern, 'original' road movie that is more novelistic than either of them. In the ironic mode of 'Magnolia', 'Amelie' and 'The Royal Tennenbaums', the very cinematic action is broken off by a parodically omniscient narrator who provides every scene with more detail than it needs, filling in back-stories, articulating feelings characters don't show, and even inventing futures for them. But whereas this narrative voice in the previous films was a part of their breathless stylistic brio, here it performs a different function. Each narration is announced by a breaking off of the action, a turning down of sound - rather than integrating itself with the overall tone, it breaks it, distancing itself from the comic antics, trusting the extraordinarily natural acting to keep our sympathy with the characters. Though initially jarring, this device provides some of the film's most haunting effects, adding layers of perspective unavailable to young characters only living for the moment, but which may agonise them in hindsight. Time and again, the film's narrow focus - two spoiled kids, who spend all their time joking,bragging about sex, drinking and smoking pot - is opened out to reveal different Mexican lives, lives not quite so privileged. The road movie - the boys are taking their adulterous cousin's wife to a non-existent beach they drunkenly boasted about at a wedding - is a time-honoured vehicle for both a journey into one's developing, maturing character, and also into the state of the nation. So while the Mexico the trio pass through is full of the colour and variety they patriotically boast of, it is also riddled with poverty, institutional racism, police brutality, and signs of death and residual superstition everywhere. At a moment of supreme joy in the story, the narrator will intrude and tell us that such and such a character will lose his job and his home, or that someone died in a road accident etc.This device makes us less guilty about enjoying the energy and the wit, the generosity and the hormonally volatile company of two brats, one very rich indeed. When they are having fun, the film sparks with pleasure at life; when they are not, you become impatient with the film's sombreness. These kids need to be well off - only they have the freedome of mobility to travel through the various Mexicos Cuaron wants to show us. They also have the complacency that needs to be tempered. But one of these boys is an inheritor of the Mexican elite - his father is a government minister once linked to a near-genocidal scandal; the President attends the gloriously gaudy wedding of his sister, all bullfighting and mariachis. The boys, for all their sexual exploration, are like two Presidential envoys, investigating and reporting from Mexico, while the real rulers swan off to Washington for conferences about globilisation.
Critics have compared 'And Your Mother Too' to 'Jules Et Jim', but the disenchanted political element is completely absent from Truffaut's film; a closer precursor would be Blier's Gerard Depardieu classic 'Les Valseuses', another road movie about two sexually obsessed young men who really want each other, and which casts a sharp eye on contemporary France. The difference being that Cuaron cares about women, and his Luisa is a wonderful creation, her own zest for life co-existing with all kinds of pain, fear and betrayal only partially glimpsed through cracked windows by the boys.
'Mother' shares a continuity with Cuaron's previous films, not just in the theme of young people unmoored from their dubious parentage and heritage, and the bittersweet narrative development, but in his amazing use of space, his ability to turn the domestic and familiar into the creepy and alienating - look at the supermarket high-jinx suddently caught in a vast, alienating long shot. His loose shooting style conceals immensely complicated compositions, framing paralell stories in the one sequence shot or image, to devastating effect, such as Luisa's break-up call to her husband while the companions she can see are reflected beside her playing foozball.
Movie Review: More Questions Than Answers, More Longing Than Love
Summary: 5 Stars
There are two themes interwoven by this coming-of-age road trip picture: The fates of its three main characters and the state of modern Mexico. Picaresque and funny, it's a Mexican "Huckleberry Finn" with sex substituting for violence and an old car for a raft.
Julio and Tenoch are in a club--Astral Cowboys they call themselves--as offbeat as anything devised by Tom Sawyer. They are 17 years old with all the mischief, shallowness, and prurience this often entails. Their girlfriends leave for Italy, and they prepare to spend a summer marking time, preparing for a future that will gel in a few years. Tenoch's wealthy father is urging him to study economics when the charismatic boy would prefer literature; Julio's more working class mother would probably be happy to see him gainfully employed.
Their bumming around includes weed-smoking, group sex, parties, dips in a country club pool (where they masturbate on the diving boards in a scene that recalls Fellini's "Amacord"), horseplay, and conversation. Things change at a more upscale party attended by the president of Mexico where they meet a 28 year old women whose marriage is crumbling.
She enjoys their clumsy come-ons and agrees to join them on a trip to a beautiful beach--Heaven's Mouth--which they made up as a sort of in-joke sexual pun. The boys don't believe she'll actually call them, but she does. In order to borrow his sister's car, Tenoch is forced to wade through a left-wing political parade, introducing the theme of turbulent Mexico into a film that had previously remained in the insular world of male adolescence.
Once the trio is on the road--to a beach that doesn't exist--Mexico goes by like a fever dream: beautiful, colorful, hurt, empty. Poverty and police presence on rural roads wake the boys up to a reality different from their own.
The adult male omniscient narrator/voiceover is more omniscient than most: He sees the past and the future, speaking like the voice of God about the land and people before us in the film, telling secrets, telling the real story and counterpointing quite nicely the shallow exuberance of the boys in the car. When he speaks, all else falls silent.
So we learn about accidents that took place on a curve in the road or a proud fisherman becoming a sad janitor.
Seeing Mexico as it really is is part of the boy's coming of age, but so is sexual discovery. They take their turn at clumsy sex with Luisa and wind up jealous with each other. Learning they sampled each other's girlfriends on at least one occasion brings the whole thing to a boil, and Julio and Tenoch argue with Latin bombast. Luisa has a theory that the boys have sexual tension between them, the kind insinuated by their morning skinny-dip in a leaf-cluttered pool lensed beautifully by director Cuaron with turquoise shimmer and unaffected nudity.
The boys and Luisa have secrets that the film's ending will reveal (but I will not). Luisa cements her break-up with her husband across the road trip in melancholy telephone conversations often juxtaposed with the boys' carefree mirth. In one scene she's balling on the phone while they enjoy a vigorous game of fooz ball. Her sadness is deepened by something else, her secret, one only hinted at near the top of the film.
I really must remark that though the film's trio of main characters are listless and lost and that the peasant life it shows is charming but bleak, there are moments of robust joy and sensuality in "Y Tu Mama Tambien." The night scene on the beach that leads to a tequila-fueled menage begins with a dance to a gorgeous ballad picked randomly on a jukebox.
The element of randomness operates with the film's ending too, which isn't pat or neat or sunny but rings true to life and the deep/shallow bonds adolesents forge, formative but fleeting.
Movie Review: Keen insight into human nature
Summary: 5 Stars
Y Tu Mamá También is visually quite different from most Hollywood movies and looks more like the independent film it is. Each viewing reveals still more details and subtle nuances; the hallmark of a good movie. It likewise touches on subjects that may be too taboo for American audiences, such as the frank depiction of the sexuality of Julio and Tenoch, the two male leads in the movie. Virtually no American movie would dare to show two men simultaneously engaging in masturbation. But in doing so the film explores the fluidity of sexual attraction, friendships, and human nature. The film is equally frank in discussing how each of the two male leads have both slept with the other's girlfriend, although you may see that in American films.
One of the more interesting aspects are the film's nuances and cultural differences and if you are not familiar with Mexican history or culture you may not get the pun in the one character's name, Tenoch Iturbide. Early in the film, he explains that his upper class parents named him Tenoch after the Aztec leader, in an effort to connect him to his Aztec heritage. Yet his surname is oddly enough that of yet another Mexican ruler, the short-lived first Emperor of Mexican, Augstín I. Clearly this was intentional by director Alfonso Cuarón, using the pompously named character to mock the wealthy white elites. The film takes place just as the PRI, Mexico's dominant political party, is starting to lose its grip on power. Both boys enjoy a life of privilege that most Mexicans do not, and their ambitions and goals show they ware not that different from most American teenaged boys.
The two boys meet Luisa, the wife of Tenoch's cousin, at a weeding, and wind up concocting a tale of an unspoiled beach they want to visit over the summer, and they invite Luisa to join them. She declines, but a few days she calls back to say she wants to join them, and the three set off in a battered old station wagon. I died laughing as the station wagon was a dead ringer for an old Plymouth Volaré I had owned twenty years ago after college. It was an old car then and certainly quite old by the time this movie was made, and certainly not something reliable I would take on the road any distance. Since the boys concocted this beach they literally and figuratively have no idea where they are going. They stay at motels that most Americans would shun, and most Americans would never consider travel without making reservations in advance, let alone without knowing where they are going and what they would find there. But the three are young and carefree, pointing out the difference in various cultures. They think nothing of sharing hotel rooms and are nonplussed by the poverty they see around them on the way to the coast.
While staying at a motel, the sexual tensions between the three come to a head. The depictions and descriptions of sexual acts here are very straightforward, and it is clear that none of the three are being faithful to any of their partners, be it husbands or girlfriends. Again, this isn't per se shocking or unheard of in American movies, but the fluidity of morals here would be a bit surprising for American viewers as it's quite a cultural difference from our own norms. The complications become myriad and overlapping in a way that is only hinted at in most American films. In the end we learn why Luisa chose to join the boys on their quest, and it's a touching and poignant message about living life to the fullest in spite of conventions or societal norms. Y Tu Mamá También is not a movie for those easily offended or who are not sensitive to cultural differences. If you speak Spanish you pick on a lot more of the dialog that is especially witty and well written. For me it's an interesting insight into Mexican culture and society.
Movie Review: Tour Guides for the Mexican Odyssey
Summary: 5 Stars
I had resisted seeing this movie for months, but when I finally was introduced to "Y Tu Mama Tambien" at a party one evening, I was so spellbound by this hypnotic sexy journey, I found myself buying a copy the next day. The true story involves our witnessing the very moments that make life worth living, despite all the harships that life has to offer. Our heros are two young immature boys, at the beginning of their last summer of freedom. One is the son of a highly respected government worker and the other is from a small working class family. Their youthful friendship however is based on the games that children play, as they shrug off maturity and replace it with parties, pot and trying to live out fantasies. Then their tour guide comes in: the beautiful wife of the upper class boy's cousin. Both boys take to her quickly and fantasize about bedding her.
To impress her, they tell her they are going to take a road trip to a beach that doesn't even exist. However, when the young woman finds out that her husband is having affairs, she asks them to take her with them and the boys plan out a journey to a Shangri-La that is as fictatious as their bold personalities. The Odyssey then begins, as the trio start their long journey to find a beach called "Heaven's Mouth". We then are left to examine the three and their short comings and inhibitions as they interact with strange minor characters along the way, have long discussions of friendship and the meaningfulness of their lives and begin to have sex with each other. One must then wonder what happens when the boys realize their fantasies are becoming realities and that their are consequences to the poor choices they make and the choices they have already made.
"Y Tu Mama Tambien" is brilliant in the fact that no matter who you are, you can't help but get a sense of nostalgia from seeing the roadtrip you always fantasized about taking yourself. Each character represents a different way of life and we are exposed to the true nature of immortality and the fading of one's personal sense of glory.
To keep the mood of this journey surreal, the film gives the audience a narration of the true story behind every character seen. We find out that a friendly fisherman will loose his job and his family will be forced into poverty and that the most noble characters will die alone and afraid. Despite these morbid distractions, it is refreshing to enjoy the very moments that our protagonists will cherish forever.
The movie is very sexually charged and is full of both male and female nudity. Our heroine makes it her personal responsibility to teach her young travel companions what sex and love really is. Despite the fact that boys are practically ten years younger than her, she sleeps with one of them, causing a lot of tension in the car ride. To make up for this, she sleeps with the other one soon after. These actions lead to the deterioration of the boys friendship, in which their fighting exposes a whole history of betrayal between them that has gone undiscussed. When their woman companion threatens to leave the car trip, the boys are forced to make ammends, but must reevaluate their relationship - of course, this leads to a climax of all three characters having sex together, releasing all inner desires and frustrations. This of course will seal the end of their friendship, their journey to Heaven's Mouth and the end of their youth, for when they return home, they must prepare to enter the adult world.
Though this movie appeals to younger audiences, one must remember that the sexual content and vulgarity is high and the themes will take age and experience to go fully appreciated. Watch it now and you will love it, then watch it a few years and it will be perfection.