The Fragility of Everything

Y Tu Mamá Tambien - Alfonso Cuarón (2001)

SPOILERS

Inseparable teenage friends Julio and Tenoch meet a beautiful older woman (Luisa) at a wedding and boast about a beach that doesn't exist that they're going to drive to. They don't expect her to call a few days later and ask if she can join them. The resulting road trip evokes the experiences and feelings of youth. The boys are aimless, incredibly competitive, usually wanting to be either high, drunk or asleep, but also confused and anxious, unable to give voice to the things that scare them. Y Tu Mamá Tambien uses the setting of a coming of age road trip film to explore the fragility of friendship, love, dreams, desires and ultimately, life.

The youthful exuberance of the two boys is constantly balanced by reminders of mortality, which appear for the most part to be totally lost on them. Whilst still in the city, they drive past an immigrant worker run down by a speeding bus. Later, further into the countryside, the narrator informs us that on a stretch of road that they're on, 10 years earlier a truck carrying cages full of chickens overturned, leaving two people dead. In the next shot we see a red truck with white cages piled high on its back, and as they pass it, the music from their cd player sputters and cuts out, the battery dead. It is only when Luisa tells them that her first lover died in a motorcycle crash at the age of 17 that the boys seem stunned into silence for the first time, his closeness to themselves too great to ignore.

Julio and Tenoch's sexual infatuation with Luisa brings out their competitiveness and leads to them spitefully admitting to sleeping with each other's girlfriends. Although they clearly desire Luisa, there is also some level of eroticism between them. One scene shows the two of them lying on parallel diving boards, masturbating into a swimming pool whilst calling out the names of women they are attracted to. Luisa latches onto this as well and during an eventual threesome scene, the two boys kiss. When they wake up the next morning in the same bed they are panicked and quickly move away from each other.

After the road trip, the two friends drift apart and the final scene of the movie is the two of them having coffee together after a chance meeting. The narrator informs us that they will never see each other again. They talk about old friends, mentioning one of their close friends who came out and was kicked out of the house by his dad. Perhaps there is acknowledgement of the fate that might have befallen them if they'd taken their feelings for one another any further, or even just admitted publicly to what had happened. Tenoch comes from an incredibly privileged background and had already had his car taken away for saying that he was planning to study literature instead of economics.

Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa died just a month after their road trip. She stayed where they had been, exploring the beaches. She had known when she asked them to take her with them that she didn't have long to live. Early on in the film, Luisa fills out a quiz in a magazine which concludes that she is "a woman afraid to claim her freedom", later on she tells the boys that the only thing she really wanted to do with her life was to travel. What she does during the film is exactly that. She travels, she loves and she does whatever she wants, there is nothing and no-one to hold her back. She wanted to give these messages to Julio and Tenoch: That they should be free to live and love as they please; That life is short and fragile and lovers and friends come and go. But in the end the two boys choose the safety of a conventional path. Tenoch finally gives in to the pressure from his dad to study economics and (we assume) gives up his dream of being a writer and Julio is about to start a degree in biology. Living in the moment and giving in to our whims and desires is something we have to choose and sometimes that choice only becomes the clear one when we are confronted with our inevitable end.

Although ostensibly a coming of age film about two teenage boys, Y Tu Mamá Tambien is really about a woman looking back at her life and attempting to impart some wisdom to the next generation. The hope being that they will be less afraid to follow their dreams and perhaps help to usher in a more compassionate and understanding world, one where maybe a kiss doesn't need to be the end of a friendship and where feelings are allowed to be confusing, free from judgement.