A ROAD TRIP TO ADULTHOOD : "Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN"

Talking about different types of road-movie and variations on the genre is all well and good in their own way, but what about the “typical” road movie? Young people, drinking, drugs, love and self-discovery… What about all that jazz? Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu mama tambien is all of this and more. The lesson, as with all road-movies, is that the journey is sometimes just as important as the destination if not more so. There will, undoubtedly, be moments of self-discovery on the way. What we do with the things we discover however, is pretty much up to us…
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch are typical teenagers. They have girlfriends, but will have sex with anyone wherever they can get it, are into drinking, partying and having a good time. So this is exactly what they are getting up to at one of Tenoch’s cousins wedding when their paths cross with the sultry 28 year-old Luisa from Spain. The boys flirt with her openly and shamelessly and in the process invite her to accompany them to Heaven’s Mouth, a secluded tropical paradise of a beach that… Doesn’t exist. So the boys are both shocked and excited when Luisa accepts their invitation. Thus starts an impromptu journey across Mexico to a destination that doesn’t exist. But as the journey progresses, the boys will find there is a lot more to discover on the road than the beauties of Mexico and the sea. What they will actually do with these discoveries however, is a completely different story all together.
I categorically loved this film. It’s a shame, a real shame, that there are some little bits in it that niggle at me to the point of preventing me from calling it perfect. The trouble with working with a genre in this way is that, there are usually a lot of clichés lying around the place. Some of them you take, change, do something innovative and wonderful with – the way Cuaron does. Some however, you might just walk right into, and then actually keep lying around. Unfortunately, Cuaron does this quite a bit too. The result it a touching, original and beautiful film that occasionally throws up a hoary old chestnut or two. Personally I chose to concentrate on the original and the beautiful. I don’t want to say too much about the many discoveries the boys make along the way – not least because the sense of discovery we feel with them is a major part of the film - but the one thing I cannot help but point out is what an excellent job Cuaron has done of using the context to tell us a bit about his country. The road is always a major character in road-movies, but here it actually almost takes on a life of its own, as a voiceover tells us stories of seemingly random things we pass on the road, the realities of Mexico and the tragedies that occur but we may well not have even noticed if we were the ones driving by… A lot of thought is given in this film to the fact that there is always more to things than the eye can see. And reminds us of that those things are there, whether we want to face them or not…