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CAR-WINDOW
SOCIOLOGY OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN MÉXICO EMERGES IN
Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN
 Two
seventeen-year-old Mexico City boys spend a summer together
in the coming-of-age Mexican film Y Tu Mamá
También, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.
When the film begins, their girlfriends are about to leave
for a vacation in Italy, though not before one of the boys,
Tenoch Iturbe (played by Diego Luna), pulls off a little quick
sex. Neither upper-class Tenoch nor lower-middle-class Julio
Zapata (played by Gael García Bernal) have a clue what
to do during the summer other than hang out together, make
ribald jokes about girls, jack off on opposite diving boards
of a local club, smoke joints, get drunk, and evade dominant
fathers. At a wedding reception, with the President of México
as guest of honor, they meet Tenoch's distant cousin Luisa
Cortés (played by Maribel Verdú), who is in
her late twenties. Luisa has recently come to México
with her intellectual husband Jano (played by Juan Carlos
Remolina Suarez), who soon leaves for an academic conference.
She has no job as yet and expresses interest in visiting a
famous beach. The boys, however, make up a story about a glorious
beach named Boca del Cielo. One night, drunk, Jano telephones
Luisa to confess that he has slept with another woman. Upset
that she can no longer trust her husband, Luisa decides to
go on an excursion with the two boys, hoping to drown her
sorrow in a little fun with the two cute boys. Julio and Tenoch
agree with alacrity, try to find directions to a secret beach
from their friend Saba Madero (played by Andrés Almeida),
borrow a car from Julio's left-wing sister, and head for the
open road with Luisa, bound for Oaxaca. During the trip the
boys hope to score with Luisa, and she likewise wants them
to enjoy a conquest. Accordingly, she gets them to talk about
their girlfriends and whether they ever had sex with them,
while they learn that she has nothing much in common with
her husband, and she mysteriously sobs in her hotel room on
the first night. In the morning Tenoch, wearing only a towel
around his showered body, asks Luisa for shampoo, whereupon
Luisa asks him to remove the towel, and the first lovemaking
session begins and ends quickly. Frustrated that Tenoch scored
first, Julio waits until they are in their own room together
to confess that he once slept with Tenoch's girlfriend, and
the two spar verbally all night until Julio begs for forgiveness
on his knees. The next morning Luisa perceives distance between
the two boys and decides that she must bring them together
by having sex with Julio and then by sweet-talking Tenoch.
But afterward, Tenoch admits that he slept with Julio's girlfriend,
trying to even the score, and the boys clash again.
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Luisa then gets out of the car to walk away, abandoning their
company for the open road. When Tenoch soon begs for Julio's
forgiveness on his knees, the two drive up to collect Luisa,
who agrees to rejoin them only when told that their destination
is near. By chance, they soon take a dirt road, get stuck
on the road, sleep in the car during the night, and discover
in the morning that the road leads to a glorious beach (in
actuality, Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca), where they pitch a tent,
swim, and accept an offer from someone on a fishing boat to
travel to a nearby resort that by chance is near an actual
beach named Boca del Cielo. While at the resort, the three
get drunk one night. Luisa tells them that their immature
sex needs to improve if they really want to please a woman,
and she ultimately initiates a threesome. Unexpectedly, the
two boys kiss each other passionately while she explores what
they have to offer lower down in their bodies, and the two
end up sleeping in the same bed. The next morning, the boys
announce that they must leave, since Julio's sister needs
the car to transport food and medicines to the poor people
of Chiapas (in contrast with Tenoch's father, who once profited
from selling tainted food to the poor), but Luisa stays, having
told her husband that the marriage is over, holding back tears.
Voiceovers throughout the film, providing social commentary
on each person, now indicate that the two boys did not see
each other during their senior year in high school, and they
broke up with their girlfriends. One day, however, they meet
for coffee. Rather than carrying out career plans to which
they aspired when their summer together began, they are now
resigned to enter university studies to major in fields (biology
and economics) on which that their parents insist, and they
appear quite serious in contrast with their happy-go-lucky
time together the previous summer. Luisa, reports Julio, died
of cancer a few days after they left her, having kept her
illness a secret from everyone. Earlier, voiceovers indicated
that the operator of the fishing boat and resort was later
evicted when the land was developed for a luxury hotel, unable
to fish because of the pollution from the new development,
and thus forced to work as a janitor in the plush resort.
Moreover, as the car travels quickly from México City
to a Caribbean beach, sights along the way (what W.E.B. du
Bois called car-window sociology) show the poverty of the
countryside and the tragedies wrought by irresponsible motorists.
Indeed, one must see the film again to perceive the "second
México" and listen to the left-wing commentary,
though Y Tu Mamá También
("Your mama also," a common riposte for a certain
obscenity in México) is also a quintessential date
movie. Thus, the theme is that elites run México, if
not the globalized world, leaving only evanescent pleasures
for the masses as a taste of freedom, a correlation so insightful
that the Political
Film Society has nominated Y Tu Mamá
También for best film on democracy and
best exposé of 2002. MH
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