Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Maribel Verdú, Marta Aura
World Cinema is revisiting Alfonso Cuarón’s masterful Y Tu Mamá También (2001), a film I’ve reviewed twice. In the original review I wrote in part: “Following two English-language films — Great Expectations and A Little Princess — director Alfonso Cuarón returned to Mexico to make this brilliant, challenging and unorthodox film. That’s obviously in part because Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) is the sort of movie that wouldn’t and couldn’t be made in Hollywood. It’s too bold and too openly and honestly sexual. As it is, the movie is being released in this country without the blessing of the MPAA and a rating. But the film also very clearly requires its Mexican setting in order to work as it does. Though never stressed, the film is almost as much political as it is sexual, taking place in a land where dire poverty rests side-by-side with more-than-comfortable wealth, where roadblocks and quixotic car searches are an expected “annoyance,” where a much more visible class structure than we have in America controls much of what happens. This may only be the background against which Y Tu Mamá También is set, but it’s a background that’s essential to the film. Several critics have pointed out that the film is essentially a variant on the Hollywood teenage flick and the “road” movie — and that’s not entirely wrong, but that analysis hardly does the movie justice. This film goes places those formulaic pieces never do, even while working in a format that is not dissimilar.”
Link to full review: http://avl.mx/nm
And here’s the later review (which contains perhaps the strangest series of comments in the history of this column afterwards): http://avl.mx/nn
Classic World Cinema by Courtyard Gallery will present Y Tu Mamá También Friday, Nov. 30 at 8 p.m. at Phil Mechanic Studios, 109 Roberts St., River Arts District, upstairs in the Railroad Library). Info: 273-3332, www.ashevillecourtyard.com
In Brief: Alfonso Cuarón’s brilliant and occasionally shocking (to some) 2001 film that translates the American “road film” into Mexican terms of both a sexual and political nature in a story about two indolent young men and an older woman on a trip to a beach that may not even exist. Perceptive and moving and as fresh today as it was when it was first released.
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