Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie
directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Carlos,
is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars
and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was
the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists
Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global
cinema.
Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics
as a coarse comedy and 'Penthouse fantasy' of youthful lust for an
older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y
Tu Mamá También not only addresses with playful seriousness such major
issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now
than they were on its release; but that the film's apparently casual
aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings
together popular genre film and auteurist experiment.
Smith suggests Y Tu Mamá También remains an example for world cinema
of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is
ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution
history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with
close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarón's film as an
enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen
movie.
