"Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too)"

Befitting a tale of discovery, "Y Tu Mamá También" is a road movie. At a lavish wedding thrown by Tenoch's parents, they meet Luisa (Maribel Verdú), Tenoch's Spanish cousin by marriage. They regale Luisa with tales of a paradisiacal, off-the-beaten-track beach called La Boca del Cielo (Heaven's Mouth) and tell her she should join them on their trip to find it. A few days later she calls them to ask if the offer is still open and together they set off. There's just one hitch: As far as the boys know, the place doesn't exist.

Traveling through the Mexican countryside in Julio's sister's car, the three begin an exploratory dance. Luisa asks them about their girlfriends, about what brings them pleasure, about their various exploits, and the two teenagers, eager to impress this "older woman" -- who's only got about 10 years on them -- brag and laugh with the overconfident boisterousness of baby seducers. It's a good front; these kids are as scared as they are turned on. Inevitably, it's Luisa who ends up seducing both of them. That may sound like the setup for an adolescent male fantasy (and there's nothing inherently wrong with a filmmaker presenting a character's sex fantasies on-screen), but Cuarón is after something more complex.

Part of the shocked, huffy response to Bertrand Blier's sex comedies "Going Places" and "Get Our Your Handkerchiefs" came from critics and audiences who couldn't see that, male fantasies though those films were, the male characters were consistently the butt of the joke. The pain and turmoil of the women characters was always treated seriously, even as Blier's subject was the ways in which men are baffled by women. Cuarón isn't baffled by Luisa. One look at her husband, the puffed-up novelist Jano (Juan Carlos Remolina Suarez), is enough to tell you hers is not a happy union. Jano is the sort of needy mama's boy who calls Luisa up after cheating on her and begs teary, drunken forgiveness. Cuarón is, however, lovingly attentive.

You understand why Luisa takes the chance to head off with Tenoch and Julio. Her attitude toward them is a sort of incredulous delight. She knows they've got rockets in their pockets and it makes her laugh -- both at them and at herself for palling around with them. And though Cuarón shares the boys' happy, greedy voracity, it's through Luisa's eyes that we come to see them -- annoying and endearing at the same time.

The movie gets great mileage out of the joke that boys at the height of their sexual potency are often woodpeckers in the sack. Neither Tenoch nor Julio last very long in their couplings with Luisa, and though she treats them tenderly, we can see the bemused frustration on her face. And, as Blier did, Cuarón takes her unhappiness very seriously. He understands there's more at stake for her than there is for the boys, that her grab for happiness has much more desperation than the boys' innocent hedonism (even if he waits to reveal all that's at stake for her). The different levels at which they perceive their spree is the source of the movie's best jokes and its most moving passages.

"Y Tu Mamá También" is unusual in that we get to see more of Tenoch and Julio's bodies than Luisa's. Even that becomes an example of the differences in their awareness, an expression of the boys' unself-consciousness. They are in awe of Luisa, and Cuarón understands that she's the powerful one in the trio. When their misbehavior gets to be too much, she lays down the law and, like obedient puppies content to frisk at her feet, they comply.

Finally, though, what this trio share is more important than what divides them. Some of the happiest moments in the movie are the three of them driving through the countryside, fast food wrappers littering the car, Luisa's feet up on the dashboard, intoxicated with the sun and the freedom of being on the move. The lovely section where they reach their fabled beach and camp with a fisherman and his family has the feel of an extended idyll, an elemental existence that drowns out the static in their heads and makes them all purr with contentment. The questers have found their seaside Eden. And it all pays off in the climax, a go-for-broke moment that's both a great, daring joke and the deepest affirmation of the movie's faith in the glories of lust.

The fearlessness of "Y Tu Mamá También" isn't Cuarón's alone. I don't think it's too much to say that the performances of the three lead actors attain the stature of offhand bravery. For the movie to work, they have to be as free and unembarrassed on-screen as their characters are, and there isn't a false note among them. It would have been easy for Luna and Bernal to caricature Tenoch and Julio (or to make the frequent mistake of youth movies and hold them up as avatars of wisdom). They're good enough to allow us to be exasperated with them without once risking our affection. And Maribel Verdú is extraordinary, balancing pleasure and sadness in a way that suggests the depths Luisa keeps hidden inside herself. When her wide, beautiful mouth opens in a radiant smile, she becomes the movie's carnal madonna, a patron saint of sexual generosity.

Maybe because honesty about sex is such a perilous road for any artist to take, inviting accusations of shallowness or voyeurism, movies that attempt to deal honestly with sex remain rare, and they almost always feel like we're seeing something new. "Y Tu Mamá También" makes you feel the slate is being wiped clean and that the movies have once again become a place where anything is possible. The last scene is the culmination of the undertow that flows all through the movie in sudden bits of omniscient narration, not unlike the stray thoughts that popped up in Godard's '60s movies. Cuarón leaves it open as to whether the memory of their adventure with Luisa will be one the boys will cherish their whole life, or whether it will haunt them in years to come as a symbol of their lost freedom. But even that uncertainty can't dispel the liberating joy in Cuarón's embrace of pleasure, in his dispensing with guilt.

I've talked about saints and madonnas, about putting faith in the erotic. Without falsifying the movie's raunchy free spirit, its combination of fairy tale and dirty joke (the title being the ultimate capper), I'd like to suggest that the movie's unabashed impulse toward life is a sort of praise-giving, that, for Cuarón, what's sacred here lies in what's profane. "In every poem by Matisse," Henry Miller wrote in "Tropic of Cancer, "there is the history of a particle of human flesh which refused the consummation of death." "Y Tu Mamá También" realizes that the deepest prayers come from that refusal.

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