Y Tu Mamá También - The Filthy Critic

This week:
Y Tu Mamá También

Filthy says:
"The saddest teen sex comedy ever, but one of the dirtiest too."

I don't know why, but I get a lot of respect from the Mexican community in Arvada. Maybe I'm in tune with their culture without even knowing it. Maybe the things I do that piss off the town leaders are admired in the Mexican community. Maybe they appreciated when I went streaking during last year's Harvest Day Parade and knocked over three drum majorettes and startled the horses.

Whatever the reason, the Mexicans around here treat me with more respect than anyone else does. It's almost like I'm royalty the way they cross to the other side of the street and tell their children to keep away from me, like I'm so important I can't be bothered. They even call me "El Pendejo Grande," which Worm said means something like "The Great Handsome," or "The Large Honorable." That's pretty cool and flattering too. I try to live up to the title by behaving as I think a grande pendejo would.

Because I am always more interested in learning about a culture of people who respect me than in those who don't (unless they've got sweet knockers like the Swedes), I avoided the latest stingy ladle of gruel from Hollywood's slop bucket and checked out a little Mexican cinema. I spent a night with the know-it-alls at the arthouse watching Y Tu Mamá También. It's ostensibly a road-trip teen gross-out comedy, but it's nothing like the tired American version, and it tries a lot harder to be sad than funny. It's clunky, corny, smart, pornographic and effectively sad.

Diego Luna is Tenoch Iturbide, the lazy, pothead son of a wealthy and corrupt politico. He's idling through the summer with his best friend Julio Zapata (Gael Garcîa Bernal), a kid from a poor family. Like most teenagers, they don't even think a world exists outside of what they know, and they believe that what they want is more important than anything else. After their girlfriends leave for Europs, they waste their summer smoking pot, drinking beer and generally looking for ways to knock off the days before college. They jerk off together on the diving boards of a country club swimming pool, brag about girls they can't have, fart in each other's presence.

They are given an opportunity to prove that they're as macho and adventurous as they claim to be when, drunk at a ritzy wedding where there are more security guards than guests, they meet Tenoch's cousin's Spanish wife Luisa (Maribel Verdú). She's gorgeous, a full-grown woman with a body that loos even better in a sun dress than naked. And she's new to Mexico. When she says she wants to see the country, they make up a story about a nonexistent, tourist-free beach called Heaven's Mouth that only they can lead her to.

A few days after meeting the boys, Verdú's husband confesses his infidelity to her and she makes a "mysterious" visit to the doctor. Suddenly wanting to experience life, Verdú takes the boys up on their offer to go to Heaven's Mouth. She ditches her philandering beau, climbs into Bernal's ancient Dodge Aspen wagon and they're off in search of a place that doesn't exist. Along the way, they encounter several rites of passage: the boys' friendship is tested, they have sex with Verdú individually and together, and they learn that they know way less about the world than they've let themselves believe.

Y Tu Mamá También looks really fucking swell, not phony postcard pretty, but like Mexico really looks. It's dirty, poor and primitive with lousy hotels on big dusty lots, but it's also expansive, open and full of wildlife, blue seas, saguaro and high dry pine forests. The movie captures the humility of the average Mexican, seemingly always hassled by los federales and contrasts it with the privileged lives of Tenoch and his kind.

Director Alfonso Cuarón captures a country that's like the girls in amateur porn magazines: beautiful but ultimately sad. The gap between the corrupt ruling class and the poor is wide and deep and he captures the unrest both too heavy-handedly and incredibly subtly. The story's narrator tells us how wealthy developers are crushing poor fisherman and, while it may be true, moments like these are as lopsided as the tits on a Tijuana hooker. They are too obvious to elicit sympathy because they're the kind of shit that rich Amercian hippies would tell you after "slumming it" in Mexico for a week. Simpler moments, like the boys, driving in Tenoch's brand new Jetta, being delayed in traffic by police covering the body of a worker killed crossing the highway because the city won't build a reasonable pedestrian crossing, make the point more effectively. Similarly, Cuarón often elegantly captures Mexican life in rural towns where locals don't even consider how political corruption will ruin them as they scratch out meager livings, and the highway curves are peppered with small crosses and memorials for the dead.

Then he throws in fart jokes and gags about beating off and ejaculating prematurely. What's so fucking funny about ejaculating prematurely? It's a horrible problem, the sort of thing that can lead a man to drink too much and spend hundreds of dollars on "cures" from the back of Juggs. Anyway, the combination of gross-out gags and political commentary doesn't complement either, it just points out how both are self-consciously included.

What does work, though, is the extensive nudity. I'm a huge fan of seeing naked people having sex, and it's all the better when it has something to do with the story. In Y Tu Mamá También, newly wild Verdú teaches Luna and Bernalabout life through sex, correcting their errors and exposing the underlying class-rift that will always separate them. Their bravado about their sexual prowess is stripped away by her maturity and sorrow. In one scene, their attempt to see her naked through her hotel window are foiled when all they see is her crying inconsolably. It's in that moment that the boys may first realize that life isn't all about good times.

I don't like the cheap-ass nudity spoonfed to us by Hollywood pricks as though they're giving us a treat. Hollywood serves up female boobs like they're the main course in some fancy San Francisco restaurant. They make a big deal about it, only to deliver a giant empty plate with a tiny dollop of boobies surrounded by whittled radishes and artsy drizzles of sauce. Sure it looks expensive, but how the fuck are you supposed to fill up on that? Sometimes, you just want a big-ass hamburger. Nothing fancy, no pretension or self-conscious coyness, just a lot of sloppy meat. Y Tu Mamá También presents sex like it actually happens: clumsy with bad lighting, a lot of fumbling and a lot of nudity. Not just women's breasts, but dicks and vaginas too. The sex isn't soft-focus, slo-mo gyrations to hit songs. They fall all over each other, grunt like pigs, and have stuttering breath. That's the stuff that give a guy a boner. It looks real, except the chick is way hotter than any of my readers could ever hope for. (Not me, though, because I got every man's fantasy: Mrs. Filthy.) Sadly, Verdú's got fake breasts, though.

The story is pretty aimless. Once on the road, the three friends mostly talk crassly about sex. Is being on the road and yammering about sticking your finger up someone's ass what passes for living life to the fullest these days? I was hoping it was something more. Otherwise, I'd go out and live to the max tomorrow if I had someone to listen to me and the money to get my Galaxie 500 out of impound. The characters talk too much and cover the same ground too often. The only time the story moves forward is when some clunky plot device is thrown in. There are obvious revelations and timely confessions that can be seen a half hour before they arrive. And over the whole story hangs Verdú's trip to the doctor. It's easy to know why she went and so when it's finally revealed, it feels sort of cheap for Cuarón to have held it back.

Three Fingers for Y Tu Mamá También. It's an interesting experiment with enough beauty, quiet moments and nudity to make it worth seeing. If you're teen boy, do everything you fucking can to see this movie because it'll fuel your masturbatory fantasies for weeks, and if you're anything like I was at 16, all the sadness in the movie will fall away as soon as you get a boner.

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