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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Alfonso Cuarón's sexually explicit Mexican road movie burns with lustful jokes, liberating joy and the pleasure of life itself.
Mar 15, 2002 | "I am one of the thousands of readers who was not only entranced but helped through life by the work of Henry Miller," wrote François Truffaut in 1975. "And I suffered at the idea that cinema lagged so far behind his books as well as behind reality. Unhappily, I still cannot cite an erotic film that is the equivalent of Henry Miller's writing (the best films, from Bergman to Bertolucci, have been pessimistic), but, after all, freedom for the cinema is still quite new."
If only Truffaut had lived to see Alfonso Cuarón's "Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too)." Erotic freedom has remained such an elusive ideal for movies that fresh, frank treatments of sex still have the power to shock us, to exhilarate us. Watching "Y Tu Mamá También" is something like what it must have been like for readers in the '30s first encountering Henry Miller. There's the same shock, the same exhilaration -- not just a sexual thrill, or the thrill of watching an artist work without a net, but the exhilaration of feeling yourself alive. Miller contended that "Tropic of Cancer" was "a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty." He was only partly right. That book, disrespect for duty and authority and piety sweating out of its every open pore, was also an ode -- and an often tender one -- to the joy of living, even the joy to be found in the agony of living. The Miller figure, most often characterized by empty pockets, a grumbling stomach and a hard-on that wouldn't quit, is also, as he says, "the happiest man alive."
Right up until its melancholy coda (captured by the casual elegy of Frank Zappa's "Watermelon in Easter Hay" on the soundtrack), "Y Tu Mamá También" is one of the most joyous movies I've ever seen, and one of the handful of great erotic films the movies have given us. Audiences in Mexico responded by making it the biggest hit in the country's history. It deserves to be just as big a hit here.
A sexually explicit comedy may come as a shock to audiences who know Cuarón from his two American movies, "A Little Princess" and "Great Expectations." It shouldn't, though. Both of those films were adaptations of wonderful books, Francis Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, and the Charles Dickens novel (which had been famously filmed by David Lean in 1946). What was striking about the two films was their atmosphere of rich sensuality. "A Little Princess" hummed with its young heroine's belief in the power of her imagination, the thing that saves her from cruel treatment during her sojourn in a girls' school. In one scene, she and the young black maid she's befriended wake in their shabby attic bedroom to discover that, while they slept, a rich man's servant has transformed it into a palace of silks and canopies, with plush robes and slippers and mouthwatering food awaiting them. It's the moment of deliverance that occurs in all great fairy tales turned into a catalog of pleasures, the two girls like miniature rajahs basking in their sudden good fortune.
"Y Tu Mamá También"
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Starring Maribel Verdú, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna
And the updated version of "Great Expectations," which turned Dickens's Pip into an aspiring artist in '90s Manhattan, transfromed the hero's ardor for the unattainable Estella into a verdant eroticism. The British critic Robin Wood -- one of the few critics to get the movie -- identified it as one of the rare book-to-film adaptations faithful to the spirit of its source while managing to be its own creation. He called it "splendid" and said "the adaptation is so free that, after a while, one ceases to think of Dickens at all."
Freedom, which in terms of moviemaking can be said to be the filmmaker's refusal to fear risk, is the key to "Y Tu Mamá También." Written by Cuarón's brother Carlos, and shot by the great Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot "A Little Princess," "Great Expectations" and Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow"), the movie puts us in the horny, sweaty skin of its two adolescent protagonists. They are Tenoch (Diego Luna), the privileged son of the country's rich, corrupt secretary of state, and his buddy Julio (Gael García Bernal), the lower-middle-class son of a single mother. These two are gentle, sweeter-tempered cousins to the louts played by Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere in Bertrand Blier's road comedy "Going Places." Free for the summer while their girlfriends are off to Italy, Tenoch and Julio are bursting out of their jeans. Tenoch makes his girl promise not to bed down with any Italians. But her plane has barely left the ground before he and Julio are talking about bird-dogging girls at an upcoming party.
Cuarón has said the movie is "about two teenage boys finding their identity as adults and ... also about the search for identity of a country going through its teenage years and trying to find itself as an adult nation." With the throwaway shots of gun-toting soldiers routinely stopping vehicles along country roads, the boys' teenage years look a lot more fun than their nation's. Cuarón presents the boys getting high, whacking off, goofing off; they're primal forces who haven't surrendered to the respectability or casual corruption that surrounds them.
It's not that Cuarón doesn't realize that they will have to grow up and make compromises, or that he's unaware of their self-centeredness or their small hypocrisies. Cuarón loves Tenoch and Julio for their direct, uncomplicated ability to feel pleasure. The hormone-fueled esprit that drives them is its own love song to the possibilities of life. They may be juvenile -- grossing each other out by farting in the car, or laying on adjoining diving boards, each calling out encouragement to the other while they masturbate ("Salma Hayek!" "Ahhhh, Salmita!"), but they're not jaded or cynical or burned out. Hovering on the verge of obnoxiousness, they are, for the experience under their belt, basically grubby innocents. Like dirty-minded virgins, they're excited by each joint, every beer, every chance for sex as if it were their first time. On middle-aged men, the funk of cigarettes and beer and sweat and sex smells of failure; on Tenoch and Julio it's the perfume of youth.
