Y tu mamá también

Today’s review is Y tu mamá tam­bién; a film from Mex­ico about two young men who take a hol­i­day with an older woman to find a hid­den beach after she dis­cov­ers her hus­band has been cheat­ing on her. Hilar­ity ensues. Before we begin, I’d like to point out that this movie has not been rated by the MPAA. See­ing as it’s a for­eign film you might not think much of this, but you should. I wish I had; it may have helped pre­pare me for the onslaught – nay, tidal wave – of nudity I was assaulted with after press­ing the play button.

I can only find one word which I feel ade­quately describes the expe­ri­ence. Awk­ward­ness. Incred­i­ble, crip­pling, painful, don’t-look-into-the-sun awk­ward­ness. Net­flix describes this film as “an escapade that involves seduc­tion, con­flict and the harsh real­i­ties of poverty.” If you count awk­ward teenager sex as seduc­tive, hor­monal out­bursts and sense­less dou­ble crosses as con­flict, and an anony­mous nar­ra­tor occa­sion­ally sug­gest­ing some sec­ondary char­ac­ters are on the low end of the eco­nomic spec­trum as the harsh real­i­ties of poverty, then this descrip­tion is dead on.

A more accu­rate descrip­tion might be some­thing along the lines of, “Long­ing to return to that irre­place­able awk­ward moment when your mom caught you in the bath­room with a nudie mag you stole from the cor­ner store? Would you like to rem­i­nisce about teenage drama, bickering, and argu­ing? Pin­ing to relive the blun­ders of ini­tial sex­ual encoun­ters? Do you enjoy the scenery of Mexico? If you answered yes to any of these ques­tions, this movie might be for you!”

If I’d seen this movie when it came out – that is, had I seen this movie when I was eight years younger than I am now – I may have enjoyed it very much. It does an fairly accu­rate job of depict­ing the joys and tribu­la­tions of being young and the self dis­cov­ery which is an inevitable result of those tri­als. I must be get­ting old how­ever, because the entire movie I had the over­whelm­ing urge to grab the young’uns by the ears, give them a good smack upside the head, and tell them to quite fool­ing around and do some­thing pro­duc­tive with themselves.

In par­tic­u­lar, I rather object to the asser­tion there are polit­i­cal themes within the plot. This plot com­mented on polit­i­cal and class themes the same way I did when I was a teenager – I liked to tell every­one I kept up on cur­rent events, but always hoped no one would actu­ally take me up on the offer to dis­cuss them because I never really put any par­tic­u­lar effort into the prac­tice. Per­haps this ado­les­cent per­spec­tive was the goal. How­ever, being older than 18 at this point, I gen­er­ally like to think I can han­dle a lit­tle more polit­i­cal insight than what you can essen­tially glean from read­ing over the daily head­lines, even if the pro­tag­o­nists in the film haven’t yet reached that par­tic­u­lar men­tal threshold.

All this being said, there were some extremely beau­ti­ful points in the film, which were per­haps only height­ened by the ten­sion and clumsy feel­ing strewn through­out the rest of the film. Per­haps that is the les­son learned in the end; even though life is often dif­fi­cult, con­fus­ing, and – yes – awk­ward, it can also be beau­ti­ful, and should be appre­ci­ated when such moments arise. Either that, or get laid when the oppor­tu­nity presents itself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 10:32 pm and is filed under News, Previews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.