And Your Mother Too (Y Tu Mama Tambien)

Having last directed the profoundly sexless Gwyneth Paltrow in Great Expectations, And Your Mother Too seems to represent a pronounced knee-jerk reaction from writer/director Alfonso Cuaron – for this multiple prize winner at the Venice Festival is a film full of fucking.

Best mates Julio (Bernal) and Tenoch (Luna) are two dick-dominated, middle class Mexican teenagers. With their girlfriends away touring Italy, they’re practically free agents, and a relative’s wedding provides an opportunity to hit on Luisa, a 28-year-old Spaniard. During a brief and fairly ineffectual flirtation with this older woman, the boys invite her to accompany them on a road trip to a beach called Boca del Cielo (Heaven’s Mouth).

When Luisa finds herself on the receiving end of some dreadful news, she decides that Heaven’s Mouth sounds like the kind of radical life change she needs. She tracks

the boys down and accepts their offer – of course, they neglect to mention that the place doesn’t exist at all.

A genuine oddity, And Your Mother Too moves effortlessly from light teen comedy to fraught melodrama, all the while accompanied by a strange external and seemingly omnipotent narrator.

Without doubt, though, the film’s most striking aspect here is its high quotient of hardcore nudity and frank sexual exchanges. Like everything else here, though, the sex

on offer veers in tone between the sensual and the utterly ludicrous, frequently in the same frame. Stranger still are the constant fleeting political references, and the spectre of death lurking over the entire affair: indeed, hardly a moment goes by without the narrator reminding us of the ghosts which haunt the landscape.

Like other recent Mexican films such as The Devil’s Backbone, this deceptively simple movie goes to unexpected places – but it wouldn’t be much of a road trip otherwise.