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By John Demetry
Alfonso Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien is kinda like sex without the orgasm. It builds and builds and plateaus and relaxes. No peak. No climax.
One of the many teasing moments in Y tu mama tambien
A cheap joke approaches revelation - approaches beauty - but disintegrates back into a cheap joke. Cuaron fails to see his artistic vision through with the sustained inventive and subversive imagination that defines art. That makes Y tu mama tambien painful to experience - especially, I think, for Queer film spectators.
They invite the sexy Luisa (Maribel Verdu), the 28-year-old wife of the rich boy's writer cousin, on a road trip to an imaginary beach. They both hope to seduce her. For reasons that later become clear, she accepts the invite. During the road trip, she seduces them. Jealousy, frustration, and buried emotions threaten the boys' friendship. Their friendship is cleverly detailed. There are funny scenes (a freshly handled fart joke) and beautiful ones (the boys swimming in a country club swimming pool). Luna and Bernal play together effortlessly; their bond feels real and familiar. When that bond eventually fails them at the moment it is truest, the actors' effort to restrain their chemistry is poignant. The boys even compose a manifesto based on their friendship: loyalty and the preference for "pop" over "poetry" being key among the tenets.
The sexual scenes in Y tu mama tambien are unusually graphic and very sexy. Cuaron uses them for a structural purpose, the meaning of which makes them even more sexy. The first pair of sex scenes are between the boys and their girlfriends. Then, there's a scene of Tenoch and Julio masturbating on the diving boards at the pool (they both come when they think of Luisa). On the road trip, Luisa first has sex with Tenoch and then, later, with Julio. Both of their feelings hurt, they reveal that they had sex with each others' girlfriends. Cuaron's deft direction of these scenes dramatizes specifically hetero male bonding and hetero male insecurity. However, it resonates with the adolescent experience of everyone in the audience. Cuaron's structural organization of these scenes links the two boys' sexual activities as the displacement of their attraction for each other - the biggest secret of "straight" male adolescence.
Cuaron sets this story of repressed sexuality within an oppressed society.
On the road trip through Mexico, the camera frees itself from the action to
reveal the world that the characters ignore - especially memorable, a group
of old women dancing in a back room of a restaurant.
A voice-over narration interrupts the narrative to make poetic political commentary. Cuaron and singular stylist cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki also come up with witty compositions that satirize the upper-class settings, such as at the swimming pool or at a wedding. Cuaron relates the characters' failure to see within themselves with their failure to acknowledge the repercussions of the corruption surrounding them. Cuaron makes an emotional equation between the failure to understand and act on personal and political levels. The coming-of-age story evokes emotions particularly familiar and poignant, as the hope youth promises is lost. By letting the audience see, Cuaron hopes the spectators also look into themselves. Cuaron examines the inherent homophobia of film spectators through the characters. Tenoch and Julio's claim to not mind that one of their friends has come out as gay establishes their - and the audiences' - gay-friendly homophobia. Uncircumcised Julio jokes with Tenoch in the locker room by demanding that he blow up his balloon. It establishes Tenoch and Julio as straight.
Sick of their bickering, Luisa tells them they should stop worrying about
who fucked whose girl and just fuck each other. That shuts the boys up. They
look at each other in horror. It begs the question: will audiences accept
the straight characters positioned as the points of dramatic identification
if those characters turn out to be Queer?
It's the question that Cuaron must, but fails, to answer. In the dramatic anti-climax, Luisa goes down on both of them - apparently at the same time. The camera frames the two boys from the waist up. Drunk, they sway toward each other. Their lips dangerously close to locking, I heard laughter in the audience. It's the laughter anticipating Julio and Tenoch's disgusted double-takes. Then, the boys kiss. The straight guy next me screamed at the screen: "No!" Cuaron keeps the kiss going. The film established such pseudo-homoeroticism as a source of homophobic humor. Now, Cuaron's sensual prolonging of the kiss is a challenge to that homophobia. Then, Cuaron cuts to the friends waking up next each other. Cuaron delivers the disgusted double-take. He leaves out the sex scene between Tenoch and Julio that would have fulfilled the film's politics and aesthetics by making concrete exactly what the friends lose when their friendship ends in the poignant epilogue. Straights in the audience are able to read the end of their friendship as shame for the sex that shouldn't have happened. Queers in the audience probably read it as shame for the sex that should have happened. It's sex the audience must imagine - or pretend not to imagine. It should have been sex that the audience must understand imaginatively, thus subverting Queer-straight spectatorship. Cuaron's cynical calculation aimed at pleasing the homophobes (gay and straight) in the audience represses the film. Y tu mama tambien becomes an example of the way movies participate in the sexual and economic oppression it attempts to attack. The heartbreak that may be felt at the end of Y tu mama tambien is because of what the spectator makes of the story and for what Cuaron fails to make of it. Cuaron gives the audience pop cynicism when it deserves poetry. |
The Queer nature of Y tu mama tambien develops slowly; it's part of the
film's satirical-emotional texture that is only fully detected at exactly
the right the moment. Two 17-year-old Mexican boys have just graduated high
school and give their farewells to their girlfriends who leave for Italy.
They are best friends, despite one being upper-class (Tenoch, played by
Diego Luna) and the other being lower-class (Julio, played by Gael Garcia
Bernal).
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