Y Tu Mama Tambien is inauspicious, but like many great films, it reaches for and touches the world and humanity in everyday actions and seemingly small gestures. Here, for instance, we have teen sexuality, laid out with all its romanticism and reality, filled with the kinds of empty-but-meaningful gestures that define humanity’s desires and their foibles. Director Alfonso Cuaron is a highly personal director, but he’s always most interested in defining his characters in relation to the world they inhabit. His two protagonists here are immature and petty yet deeply human, reflections of a society that won’t admit it has given birth to them and which they, initially, want no part in. He gives us a profoundly human story, built on the eternal humanness of sex as a marker of adulthood and childishness, and given life by Cuaron’s wonderfully and contrapuntally painterly version of sloppy, slovenly reality. Continue reading
Film Favorites: Y Tu Mama Tambien
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It would appear that selling one’s soul to the devil of commercial filmmaking can in fact serve a purpose, assuming of course you do so with a ruthless pragmatist’s eye. For that is exactly what one of Mexico’s most adored modern auteurs, Alfonso Cuaron, did with his introduction to English-language cinema in his one mercenary venture, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (no slouch as a film on its own, incidentally). For the success he had with big-budget tentpole cinema not only made a boatload of money (and made a franchise legitimize itself in the process, after two unflaggingly hum-drum entries beforehand), but it paved the way for one of the finest films of its decade, 2006’s Children of Men. If the entirety of the Harry Potter franchise only existed to validate the existence of this one film, well, it would be a job well done, for Children of Men is exactly the variation of cold-brewed, home-spun, plaintive sci-fi we don’t much see anymore, and exactly what the world of cinema circa 2006 needed. 
The Long Take 