Dec 1 - "What idiots! Now you're friends again!"

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

dir. Alfonso Cuarón (A Little Princess, 1995)

CAST
Diego Luna (Milk, 2008)
Gael García Bernal (The Science of Sleep, 2006)
Maribel Verdú (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006)

Lately I'm really into the foreign films, if you all don't mind my sounding snooty for a moment, they just seem more sophisticated than American movies (what? more sophisticated than Miss March? Indeed!), and I'm not just talking about the sex scenes.

I said last time that I saw parallels between yesterday's trashier raunchy comedy and today's profound exploration of identity and personal growth. So, they say that there are no new stories, just new ways of telling old ones. Well, we've basically got two stories about young guys on a road trip talking about their cocks a lot. Except in Y Tu Mamá También (So titled because when Tenoch confesses that he banged Julio's Mom, Julio responds...) it seems nicer because they're doing it in Spanish.

The climax of the movie is pretty intense, also kinda hot. Like I said before, the story is very straightforward, Tenoch and Julio are two buddies who are taking Luisa, an older woman who just left her husband, to a beach that doesn't exist. But they discover stuff about themselves along the way. It's nice, but the climax is weird, and the denouement is a bit of a downer, but sometimes you can't really expect a happy ending. These Spanish movies are all kind of like that (I was thinking of Sex and Lucía, but I guess I watched that just a few days before I started blogging about all my media adventures [not exactly true, I also watch a lot of TV that I rarely talk about]).

I guess what makes this movie seem smart is the constant allusions to the world outside of the story. There was this weird stylistic thing where the camera would occasionally drift away from the protagonists and follow a background character for a brief period. I suppose this was to show the greater context of Mexican life. The political tumult that everyone seems to be involved with except for our two young heroes. These tangents were sometimes accompanied by narration describing something horribly tragic which happened to the person or place Our Heroes were passing by, but sometimes it was left tacit, the military stops another car by the side of the road and the protagonists laugh and laugh about something stupid. But we know better, we are the omniscient audience.