Why can't I just enjoy this exuberant, highly critically acclaimed film? I have no problem with nudity or a focus on sex (on the borders of intergenerational), and I think that the three leads are superb. The film is visually strong and well-edited. Director Alfonso Cuarón seems to share the joie de vivre of the two recent high-school graduates whose summer vacation is shown in the film (and is sympathetic to their boredom). And Cuarón seems to be enjoying himself making movies, as the French New Wave once did. With an inscrutable (but not unscrewable) woman between two young male friends, "Jules et Jim" especially springs to mind. If I recall correctly, it (and some other New Wave films) also used voice-over omniscient narration (here done by Daniel Jimenez Cacho, star of Cuaron's breakthrough 1991 film, "Solo Con Tu Pareja").

This kind of telling is a dangerous device. Here it recurrently stops the movie and seems to interrupt a cinematic 21st-century comedy about adolescent horniness with reading a 19th-century expository novel eager to point out facts unknown to the characters. These give the audience --at least an audience with some knowledge of Mexican political history -- a lot of information and show that the film-makers are more politically aware than the characters, but they have too easy ironies (for instance, we are told that the escaped pigs are going to be consumed at a large fiesta and create a trichinosis epidemic).

What annoys me is primarily in the final quarter hour, and I want to mark off discussion of that (below) for those reading this who have not seen the film.

I guess that there is a plot. There are these buddies (with names carrying heavy burdens of Mexican history) Tenoch Iturbide (played by Diego Luna, who was Carlos in "Before Night Falls") and Julio Zapata (played by Gael García Bernal, who in addition to being the standout in "Amores Perros," he played Che Guevara on the miniseries "Fidel"). Tenoch is from an elite family, one that gets Mexico's president to its wedding receptions. Julio's mother is a secretary and he lives in an apartment that seems to me posher than could be supported by such an income, but seems seedy enough to Tenoch that he feels he needs to lift the toilet seat with his foot).

The film begins with each of them pounding it into his girlfriend before the two girlfriends set off for a summer in Italy. The boys consider themselves studs, as well as being connoisseurs of drugs and music. That is, they are typical teenagers full of themselves and dripping attitude to adult males, such as Tenoch's cousin, a writer in his pastel suit at the wedding.

The boys flirt with the Spanish-born wife of Tenoch's cousin, Luisa Cortés, played by Maribel Verdú (" "Belle Epoque"). (I missed her last name when she was introduced, but it is the same as the Spanish conquer of Mexico.) On the sperm of the moment they invent a beach, which they call "Boca del Cielo" (Heaven´s Mouth) and invite her to accompany them to it. After she gets a tearful phone confession of adultery from her husband, she decided to take up the invitation. This throws the boys into a tizzy, but they arrange to take a station wagon that Julio shares with his sister and set off for the coast.

They learn that Luisa does not come from a grand background, and is a dental technician rather than a philosopher or a psychologist. The car breaks down, each of the boys has sex (lasting a few desperate thrusts) with Luisa and the green-eyed monster settles in. First the two boys, then the three discuss sex at length and she gives them a number of pointers (as well as noticing their points when they awaken from dozing on the drive to the Oaxaca coast). Pretty charming and funny and sexually frank. But...

Plot Spoiler alert

Totally lost, they end up on a beach and even find one called "Boca del Cielo" and have an idyllic time. The boys reconcile in a big way in their own private "boca del cielo." They have not only the "excuse" of a threesome with an experienced adult woman but the "Boy, was I drunk last night" one. That they are uneasy about what happened when they wake up in bed together is very plausible. However, it seems to me that if Tenoch was going to throw up, it would have been during the night. This recalls the ludicrous moment in "The Crying Game" when Stephen Rea sees what is between Jaye Davidson's legs) in marked contrast to Nico and Dani (in the Spanish film named for them). Actually, Julio shrugs it off. Like getting it on with his best friend's girlfriend, it seems in the realm of "these things happen" to him. We already know that they are far less sophisticated than they fancy themselves to be, with even Julio going berserk when Tenoch tells him that he slept with Julio's girlfriend (though I'd think Julio would doubt the report). Luisa seems pleased about what she has engineered, thinking she has brought them together. (She's wrong.)

But the real crushing load of Counter-Reformation guilt is still ahead. In the last scene in a coffee shop Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa has died of cancer and knew she had it when she went with them (and stayed on when they returned to Mexico City). This might be interpreted as a bolt from the blue, like the collision in "Amores Perros," but it seems way too much in "The Harlot Must Die" tradition of punishing the woman (that she is not a "harlot," and that the cancer is presented as a "pre-existing condition" to the sex she has after leaving her unfaithful husband is irrelevant -- in the old Hollywood code, the punishment had to fit the crime, but the punishment could be for another crime as in "The Postman Always Rings Twice").

Obviously, I was bummed out by the ending. It seemed to me a guilty apology from the film-makers for the immoral fun they had been having in making the movie and in enjoying putting the rutting young stallions on the screen in their very naked vulnerability as well as in their verbal and physical swagger.

The film-makers

Alfonso Cuarón, a native of Mexico City, made a little-seen-in-America 1991 AIDS comedy "Sólo con tu pareja" (shown here as "Love in the Time of Hysteria"), then filmed "Great Expectations" and "The Little Princess" in Hollywood before returning to Mexico to make "this film (cowritten with his younger brother Carlos, as was "Pareja").

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki was nominated for an Oscar for Cuarón's "Little Princess" and also for "Sleepy Hollow."

The main actors are real-life long-time friends and one of them (I forget which) was in a soap opera with Maribel Verdú. There is a lot of talent involved in making this bemused observation of a road trip through urban and rural and very class-stratified Mexico. Like "Amores perros," its critical acclaim seems to me excessive, but it is an interesting film of more ambition than is immediately obvious. There was a lot that I enjoyed, but I think the taste of ashes left at the end is unearned moralistic posing.

(I couldn't keep up with the dialogue in Spanish, but raunchy as the subtitles are, the dialogue is raunchier still, and the narration is under-translated. I'll have to wait for the DVD, to make a more systematic comparison of what I hear in Spanish and what I read in English.)

(Mexican sexual mores seem to be changing, in particular to greater acceptance of oral sex than was prevalent when I did fieldwork in Mexico City in the late-1970s and early-80s. This fictional representation is consistent with the evidence in The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS, the superb new book by Héctor Carrillo, based on research in Mexico's second-largest city,)

I prefer last summer's "Adventures of Felix" as a road movie in which the film-maker's ending is earned. However, "Y tu mamá" is less pretentious than "Amores Perros."



Recommended:
Yes