Long, black roads of tar and gasoline, visions of Jack Kerouac, greasy-spoon diners and desolate fill-up stations. Seedy motels, hitchhikers thumbing for rides and broken-down metal machines along the highway. These are the images conjured up when thinking of the traditional road trip.
The road movie has always been seen as a uniquely American invention and concept. And yet, it isn’t. There is a large body of work from all over the globe that contains similar themes and characters, but that deal with them in distinctly different ways based on the cultures they come from. One of these films, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Y Tu Mamá También,” is playing at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on Saturday.
“Y Tu Mamá También” centers on two friends, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna). After their girlfriends leave them to go to Italy, the boys convince an older, more experienced woman named Luisa (Maribel Verdú) to travel with them in search of a serene beach called “Heaven’s Mouth.” After some deliberation on the part of Luisa, the three wandering souls hit the open road in a beat-up car.
It’s undoubtedly one of the greatest films to hail from Mexico so far in the 21st century, and a great entry point into the overlooked cinema of a country so close to our own.
Cuarón uses the road movie formula in order to document the people and places of a modern Mexico. Though the main characters come from well-to-do backgrounds, there are constant reminders throughout the film that not all is right in their homeland.
In between conversations about his characters’ love lives and, perhaps more specifically, their sex lives, Cuarón intercuts sequences narrated by an unknown voice that highlight many of the social and economic issues of the nation, particularly the problems of an oppressed peasantry. The result is a startling portrait of a country in disrepair, worsened by violence and corrupt politicians.
Incredibly daring and erotic, “Y Tu Mamá También” explores human sexuality in an unflinching light, an approach very rarely and expertly done in film. Cuarón doesn’t hide much of anything. The explicit scenes are some of the most realistically depicted in recent memory, and little is held back. However, this is not to say sex in the film is gratuitous; sex functions as a further way to explore the characters and the relationship between them.
“Y Tu Mamá También” is many things: a road movie, a sexual odyssey, a coming-of-age story and a social commentary. It brilliantly captures directionless youth living in a land stricken by many troubles.
What locally screened films do you think deserve their time in the spotlight?