Y tu mamá también

After finishing Mario Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, I was looking forward to experiencing more of the talents of so-called "Latin America". Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también could hardly have arrived from another region, and rejoices in its setting. It's hard to put words like road-trip and coming-of-age to this movie, as its would-be genre neighbours are not up to the task. This may be the best movie I've seen in recent memory - I highly recommend it.

The story revolves around the transition to manhood of two best friends, still boys and interested in the boyhood interests of sex and drugs and their code of friendship . They seem inseparable, despite coming from different social strata. Tenoch (Diego Luna) is the son of a politician and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) is the son of a secretary, but their boyhood code of friendship (charolastras) overrides such boundaries. Their girlfriends off to Italy for a holiday leaves them free to experiment with their favourite vices.

Enter Luisa, the beautiful (and slightly older) wife of one of Tenoch's relatives. From Spain, she is as new to Mexico as the viewer, and this device is used to showcase the beauty and poverty of Mexico throughout the movie. The boys seize upon her husband's travels, and (not really expecting her to accept) invent a fantasy beach to invite Luisa to in the hopes of getting her involved with their vices.

Luisa accepts, somewhat startling the boys, and so begins the road trip to the fictional "Heaven's Mouth".

This movie could so easily have gone wrong. The boys could be utterly despicable examples of the problems with youth today, the places they stop on the road trip could so easily be tedious, the endless innuendo and outright sex talk could be gratuitously vulgar, and the sex scenes and nudity too. However, Alfonso Cuarón holds it tightly together, making the boys crass but understandable, the road trip an exploration of the good and bad of Mexico, the sex talk the battle of wits that form part of the growing friendships, and the sex scenes a necessary part of the slice of life that is the movie. It is not raw or unpolished, it is transparent and real, without gloss or that blur that softens life in popular movies.

The latter third of the movie are a slow rollercoaster, with some ups and downs obvious and expected, but some quite surprising. The actors shine, exuberant buddies living life, then depressed and hating each other, then indifferent and avoiding. But not necessarily in that order.