Y Tu Mamá También

Y tu mamá también (2001) follows two teenagers and an older woman driving across Mexico. Julio and Tenoch are seventeen and their girlfriends have gone to Europe for the summer. At a wedding they meet Luisa and invite her to a beach that does not exist: Heaven's Mouth. She refuses at first. Then she learns her husband has been unfaithful and calls them: we are going. Along the way the two boast, lie and try to establish superiority over each other. Luisa sees it and uses it. The strongest element is the narrator. The music and the dialogue cut out, a voice comes in, and it tells us things the characters do not know: the name of an accident victim on the road, what will happen to the village they pass through within a few years, a secret in one of their families, how one of them will die. That voice lifts the film out of a coming of age story into a portrait of a country. There are police checkpoints, migrant workers and political posters constantly in the background, and nobody looks at them. Cuarón wrote it with his brother Carlos. Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna star; they were childhood friends in real life. Emmanuel Lubezki shot it; the camera frequently leaves the characters and drifts to something else. There was an argument over its distribution in Mexico because of the age rating. It was nominated for the original screenplay Oscar. It runs 106 minutes. Good for: road films, Mexican cinema, and coming of age. Less good for: the sexual content is very explicit and the ending is abrupt.