#23 — Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
In a recent issue of the U.K. movie magazine Empire, Francis Ford Coppola took a swipe at Steven Spielberg, asking him, though an editorial intermediary, when he was going to finally make a personal film. Spielberg was understandably taken aback, noting that all of his films are personal, a quality I suspect even many of his detractors would concede is readily apparent. Whatever the motivation for Coppola’s passive aggressive query, it seemingly stems from some confusion over the difference between autobiographical and personal. Just because Spielberg doesn’t make movies about movie directors or other types of artists standing in for directors, or build a film around familial concerns that have broad, obvious corollaries to his own, doesn’t mean that there’s nothing personal there. Case in point: Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien.

I don’t really know if the film, written with his brother, Carlos Cuaron, is autobiographical, and I sought no additional background to prepare for writing this. To a degree, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t feel autobiographical, lacking the confessional quality of such works, or the lapses into sentimentality that often mark memoirs disguised as fiction. It does, however, feel personal. It feels like the kind of film that could have only come from him, rich with detail and casually, quietly potent imagery. Every bit of it is a testimony to experience, to heritage, to the emotions built into growing up, learning the difference between playing at manhood and living within it. It is about Mexico in a way that feels like a cultural slideshow and more like an external processing of how the place shaped him, and how he shaped the place in return, both in the shifting sands of memory and in the actual impact left in living there. The film doesn’t teach, it experiences, taking the viewer along. The film feels like Cuaron truly opening himself up to share something, a sensation built right into its honesty and sneaky emotional heft. It routinely becomes deep in its lightest moments, and illuminates universal experiences by trafficking in the most focused of individual experiences. In some ways, it’s the most intimate film of the past ten years.

It is a road movie, following two young male friends as they journey across the countryside, brashly, boyishly experiencing life with a hungry impulsiveness and cackling self-satisfaction. They encounter an older woman who comes along for the ride, for reasons they can’t really discern and lack the intellectual curiosity to try and parse anyway. They all work off of one another, bringing dynamic interplay to their exchanges as their hulking vehicle kicks up dirt and dust. Most prominently, there is sexuality at play, and Cuaron is uncommonly fearless in bringing it to the screen in a frank and truthful manner. He gives equal attention to the alluring nature of human sexuality and its rutting hopelessness. He brashly, boldly depicts it as rough and unappealing. All of the characters are clinging to life, trying to feel it more deeply through the press of naked flesh. Other soft-lit movie scenes push a needy transcendence with such moments; Cuaron exposes it under the harsh glare of an unforgiving sun. As the characters go through different couplings, and then a brief tripling that sheds a participant to become a new coupling that will cause some anxiety when the morning arrives, there is the hovering question of how all this matters. What does the play-acting of machismo hide?

It takes acting as fearless as the writing and directing to make a film like this work, and Cuaron found hearty collaborators in his primary trio. Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal are an extraordinary tandem as the two friends, their accomplishment as intertwined as that of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis a decade earlier in Thelma and Louise. Very different films, very different performances, but both film pairs boast that ever-elusive quality of acting partners who play off each other so effectively that it’s nearly impossible to think of one without the other. Luna and Bernal suggest an entire history with their work, one that subtly suggests the future the film holds. Perhaps even better is Maribel Verdu as the women who joins and eventually guides their journey. She is asked to do everything possible of an actor giving a performance short of belting out an aria, and she conquers each challenge with incredible skill, tempering her conviction with hints of endearing uncertainty. Shaped by greater experience and heavier worries, her character is arguably fumbling as urgently as the boisterous boys, seeking satisfaction with a very different deadline in mind. Verdu makes it moving without giving in to the temptation to lather his work in glimmers of portent. She plays a woman trying to figure out the best way to live her life, and does so with minimal fuss.

Y Tu Mama Tambien is daring and enlivening. It is also a film that has something to say, but is not burdened by it. It’s leaning over at the bar and whispering its confession in your ear, confident that, somehow, you’ll understand.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)