Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
This is frustrating.
Chances are if you clicked on this link to read this story, you're already the kind of person who goes to see foreign films. You may have read other reviews of this film here on the site, like the excellent review that Mr. Beaks sent me yesterday, or you may have been over at Rotten Tomatoes, where the film is doing incredibly well so far. You may have seen the many articles written about Alfonso Cuaron in the last few weeks, like the excellent cover story in last week's LA WEEKLY. Chances are you're the exact audience who would go see this.
And, to be honest, I don't really want to talk to you.
I wish I could figure out how to get the word out to people who don't typically go see foreign films that Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN isn't your typical foreign film. Every year, there's a picture that comes out like AMELIE or CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON or GIRL ON THE BRIDGE that has the potential to cross over and really play to a broad audience, even if it is subtitled. Sometimes the films find that broad audience, and sometimes they don't. All the hard work and best intentions in the world can sometimes fail to connect for the plain and simple reason that audiences hate to feel like a film is going to be work. You almost have to trick them into seeing a foreign film sometimes. CROUCHING TIGER's trailers didn't really feature any dialogue, so there's nary a hint of the subtitles. Instead, the action and the epic scale of the thing was emphasized, as well as the romance, all of it communicated visually. With Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, there's no kung-fu, so it's a little harder to sell. They have one secret weapon on their side, though, and if they're smart, they'll use it for all it's worth.
I'm referring, of course, to sex.
When I went to see the film last week at the LA Film School, right across the street from the about-to-reopen Cinerama Dome, I took my girlfriend with me. She's my favorite person to watch movies with now, even above my film geek buddies, because of how genuine her reactions are. According to her friends, she was never really into movies before we started going out, but she's proven to be an adventurous viewer. I love how open she is to different film experiences, and I love sharing movies with her in the hopes that she'll fall in love with them. She's willing to try just about anything, and she doesn't seem to carry a lot of baggage into movies. That's refreshing after wading through the nine bazillionth fanboy flame war about whether LOTR or STAR WARS "rulez more ass." Also, she's from Argentina, so I wanted to see how she reacted to what many people were describing to me as the most important Spanish-language movie since AMORES PERROS, which, by coincidence, was the first film we saw together. I didn't read a word about the movie before we went, though, so I really didn't know what to expect. A week later, she still talks about the film in a bit of a daze, surprised by what she saw.
Alfonso Cuaron lets you know right away what kind of film you're about to see. The very first scene of the film shows a young couple in bed, explicitly fucking, talking about a trip she's about to take. He begs her not to fuck anyone else on the trip, and she runs down a litany of all the various types of men she's not allowed to be with: Italians, Frenchmen, Germans. It's funny, just a little insecure, and surprisingly hot. The next scene shows another young couple trying to grind out a quickie before leaving for the airport to drop her off. Again, it's very frank, and there's something unforgettable about that sort of hurried coupling with parents in the house, something about the erotic charge that comes with being young and in danger of discovery that Cuaron captures with a surgical eye for detail.
The two couples end up together at the airport, where Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) are saying goodbye to their girlfriends, who are leaving to study abroad in Italy. The two boys are best friends, Charolastras, dedicated to smoking as much pot as possible, having as much sex as possible, and doing as little work as possible. It's the perfect lifestyle for Tenoch, whose father is a corrupt government official. For Julio, this is a last hiccup before the full weight of responsibility comes crashing down on him like a ton of bricks, and he knows it. Tenoch is going to be going to a university, no matter what, but for Julio, the future is a little less obviously bright. The two of them do their best to stave off any thoughts of the real world or the future, simply enjoying every moment they can. One of the things that Cuaron has done so well here (along with his brother Carlos, who co-wrote the script) is the way he has a third-person narrator provide counterpoint throughout the film in odd asides that seem to be unrelated to what we're watching. They provide a larger social context for us, filling in the portrait of modern Mexico that we're watching. It's incredibly effective, and it reminds you of just how possible it is to live in this world without ever being touched by it, especially if you have the cushion of money. One of the asides in particular stuck with me, a brief glimpse of a sheet-covered body on the side of a busy highway as we hear that the victim was a migrant worker who chose to cross this stretch of road every day rather than walk two miles out of his way in order to get to work. We take a long look at the man's body, but Julio and Tenoch don't pay a bit of attention. They're too busy playing the same infantile fart games that teenage boys the world over are amused by every day. For some reason, I was pierced by that juxtaposition of the crass and the tragic, something that Cuaron manages to pull off over and over as the film unfolds. There's another one near the end involving a fisherman and a local tour guide that just about brought me to tears. It's poignant, it's bitter, and there's nothing you can do about it. It is simply the way life works in Mexico, and no one is spared.
At a family wedding that is more political opportunity than anything, Tenoch is reunited with a cousin of his, a pompous windbag of a guy who basically mocks Tenoch's idea of becoming a writer one day. Julio and Tenoch meet the guy's wife, a beautiful Spanish woman named Luisa (Maribel Verdu), and they flirt shamelessly with her. They invite her to take a road trip with them, even though they don't have any plans for one, and they make up the name of a beach they are going to, describing Boca del Cielo (Heaven's Mouth) to her as a slice of paradise, untouched by touristas. There's something puppyish about the way they compete for her attention in their first encounter, and she's totally aware of the effect she seems to have on these two boys, both of them frantic to be men.
As the next few days drift by, we see how bored Tenoch and Julio are, and how their idle horniness can barely be contained. In the bound-to-be-infamous diving board scene, the two lay on diving boards over the deep end of the pool at the country club where Tenoch's father is an officer. Listing fantasy girls, they jerk off, racing to climax at the mention of Luisa and Salma Hayek, leading to an underwater shot of bobbing seed at it speckles the water's surface. The movie has an outrageous sense of humor at times, but this is no AMERICAN PIE or TOMCATS, and part of what distinguishes it is the exceptional work by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot A LITTLE PRINCESS and GREAT EXPECTATIONS for Cuaron, as well as his first film LOVE IN THE TIME OF HYSTERIA (or SOLO CON TU PAREJA), which I still haven't seen. Their collaboration is one of the great ones in current cinema, and just looking at the stylistic differences between A LITTLE PRINCESS and this movie, you can see how much range these artists have, and how well they seem to work together. Lubezki's camerawork is almost documentary style in this film, and that's appropriate since Cuaron is so unflinchingly honest.
There's a scene here during this stretch of film that sort of sneaks by you, a brief moment involving Luisa, and it holds the key to the rest of the movie. It's done without words, and Cuaron does his best to distract you from what you're seeing. This one moment earns everything else that happens, though, and is crucial to our understanding of what happens after Luisa finds out that her husband has been sleeping with other women. She calls up Tenoch and asks if he and Julio are still going to visit Heaven's Mouth. At first, he doesn't remember what she's talking about, but he quickly recovers and says yes, excited when Luisa invites herself along. He and Julio quickly borrow a car so they can make the drive to where the beach could be, figuring they'll just find someplace they can call Heaven's Mouth, and until then, at least they'll be alone with Luisa. She's got her own agenda, though, and when they hit the road, all three of them find themselves confronting ideas and experiences that never occurred to them before.
For Luisa, this is a beginning. She's determined to experience some of the things she missed by getting married young and being responsible from a very early age. For Tenoch and Julio, this is an ending. They realize that the unspoken rules that bind them have been violated and broken over and over, and that neither of them has been a proper friend to the other. How much of this is because of their class separation and how much of this is just the natural competitive nature of boys is left to the viewer to determine, and it's beautifully acted by Luna and Bernal. They go through any number of shifts in attitude over the course of the piece, and they'll all perfectly underplayed. Each of them ends up having a sexual encounter with Luisa, and it drives them apart for a time before she is able to find a way to bridge the gap between the two of them. These sexual encounters are directed and performed with a frank casualness that left many in our theater gasping, shocked. One scene in particular caused an eruption of noise from the entire row in front of us, cries of horror and laughter and admiration for the sheer nerve of what they were watching. I found myself aroused not just by the sexual nature of the film, but also by the intimate nature of it. There's a candor to the entire movie that really pulled me into the screen. This felt like an experience, like a real journey. Part of that may have been the fact that Cuaron shot the film in order, allowing the actors to grow and react and feel the entire journey the way it would unfold. Part of it is that the script never does the easy thing.
Even at the end of the movie, when some big revelations are dropped regarding certain characters, there's a sense of inevitability that doesn't slip into predictability. Things unfold with the grace and odd synchronicity of life. What begins raunchy and rude ends in a quiet, awkward encounter in a diner, and by that moment, Cuaron has secured his place as an important voice in world cinema, finally delivering on all the promise his earlier film work has shown. As we left, I asked my girlfriend about the film, and she told me that the subtitles barely scratched the rich texture of the dialogue between the characters. I'd already decided to learn more Spanish so I am able to speak to her in her native tongue at times, but now I have even more incentive. I'm sure I'll be seeing this film again in the future, and if there's more pleasure to be wrung from this dense, smart, achingly lovely look at life, love, and the ways we protect our hearts as we become adults, then I look forward to it.
The film opens in New York and Los Angeles today, and should be rolling out across the country in the weeks and months ahead. It is worth keeping your eye out for. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
