Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN!

6/10

And Your Mother Too! : Mexico 2001 : Alfonso Cuaron : 105 mins

Last year Amores Perros landed on our shores in a blaze of hype and critical adulation which the film itself never quite managed to justify. Now we have another Mexican state-of-the-nation film, with the same young star (Gael Garcia Bernal, the latino Jared Leto), and another tidal wave of ecstatic advance word. This time, however, we soon escape the claustrophobic confines of Mexico City – Y Tu Mama is a road movie in which teenage best-mates Julio (Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) head through the countryside in search of a mythical beach called “Heaven’s Mouth”, accompanied by the beautiful, thirtyish Luisa (Maribel Verdu). Luisa’s marriage to Tenoch’s cousin has suddenly hit the rocks, and she’s more than willing to help out the randy lads with their emotional and sexual development. Tenoch and Julio can hardly believe their luck – but things don’t run as smoothly as they expect…

Despite some surprisingly raucous American Pie-ish touches early on, the scale of Cuaron’s ambition is never in doubt – he uses the friendship between spoilt rich kid Tenoch and barrio boy Julio as a starting-point to examine the different layers that make up Mexican society. The road-trip format allows him to explore the bewildering range of his country’s geography, while commentary from an unseen narrator puts everything into a social and economic context. The results are a bit stop-start, however, and the second half often feels as aimless as our teenage heroes, dragging towards a downbeat finale in a way that makes the three-hour Perros seem positively breezy in comparison. And those interjections, make you want to tell Cuaron that, if it’s a novel he wants to write, pens and paper are still available.