Sexuality and the Sacred: Reflecting on 'Y tu mamá también'
A still from ‘Y tu mamá también’ from Film-Grab.com
Their families never found out about the trip to the beach with Luisa. She stayed behind to begin her exploration of the local coves the next day. When they said good-bye, she told Tenoch and Julio, “Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea.”
So goes the poignant narration towards the end of Y tu mamá también, Alfonso Cuarón’s breakout 2001 feature that launched Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna to international stardom, and opened up Cuarón’s career to miraculous heights. The camera cuts between Julio and Tenoch, two best friends on the cusp of adulthood, as they clear up their tent on the beach overrun by stray dogs. We see Luisa, the thirty-something wife of Tenoch’s cousin who has left her home in the city to embark on this mysterious road trip. She discards her established life to reach the mythical ‘Boca del Cielo’ (a fictitious point on Mexico’s Pacific coast which, in a magical realist twist of fate, is happened upon by the hapless three). She treads down the sand to the cusp of the sea, unthreading herself from her towel, and we watch with bated breath as it flutters down to the ground. The ocean stretches out before her, an impossible blue: there is a moment of fragile connection between her and us, both surveying the infinite expanse beyond. Wordless, she dives in. Wordless, we watch.
Y tu mamá también has been widely credited as the watershed moment for the international rise of the ‘Nuevo Cine Mexicano’ in the early 2000s, and Cuarón enjoyed widespread acclaim alongside fellow auteurs such as Antonio Serrano, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro. The film preoccupies itself with both a distinct rootlessness and a deep sense of belonging to the country it depicts. The terrains that it winds through (from the labyrinthine cityscape of the capital to Oaxaca’s golden sierras and beaches) bleed with spatial and emotional interconnection, yet are inhabited through constant displacement (the film is poised as a classic teenage road movie). These act not simply as a backdrop to the narrative but a meaningful, unceasing presence, as much a part of the protagonists as their eyes and ears and tanned, flaunted bodies.
Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera relish in their subjects with a neorealist intensity, linking the landscape irrevocably to its bodies. The long camera sequences (later to be replicated in the likes of Children of Men (2006) and Roma (2018)) stretch out to capture the ‘mundanities’ of the world around the protagonists: men searched by armed police on the side of the road, an elderly woman’s shrine to her dead granddaughter, the looming crisis of an fisherman’s prospective unemployment… All are witnessed as part of the land, not simply as actors within it. That the film’s final sequence is precipitated by a glimpse of sexual intimacy between Julio and Tenoch, gazing upon what had previously been unmentionable between them, shows an inevitable transition from the ‘sacred’ (a pastoral vision of Mexico, of the landscapes they have not simply driven through but, it seems, become intertwined with) into the visual relishing of the ‘profane’. A sexuality without borders, one beyond the previous shows of machismo, beyond the iron fist of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and into the 21st Century. Cuarón’s un-sanctionable bodies, often in various states of exhibition (even outside of the most sexual scenes) are constantly the focus of our attention. So casually are they displayed to us, that when the desire that exists between Julio and Tenoch is revealed in the end, it feels as if an act of climax has been achieved: their hidden closeness (a specifically subversive queer closeness), we realise as viewers, has not been so hidden after all. Cuarón’s gazing savours in its subjects. It hesitates. Clarifies.
And yet, I would hesitate to call Y tu mamá también ‘pornography’. Sure, in the basest sense of the word, it participates in an aestheticisation of the sexual: Cuarón’s naked and half-naked bodies explode into the frame with startling frequency, all seeking to derive pleasure from one another, to convince us to derive it for ourselves… However, the film resists commodity, preferring to delve into a realm that might even be called spiritual. The characters come away from their experiences of each other having undergone a profound personal transformation: after Luisa submerges herself into the ocean, we are transported back to Mexico City, where, as the omnipresent narrator divulges, an estranged Julio and Tenoch have arranged to meet for coffee after bumping into each other. They sit across from one another, the light muted, the vibrancy of previous scenes dissipating between them; they make small talk, and reveal that while Julio has pursued their shared dream of studying literature at university, Tenoch has caved into his family’s pressure and opted for economics. Conversation is difficult. Finally, Tenoch offers up the ultimate, crucial piece of information that links them together: Luisa is dead. In fact, she had known she was dying the whole time she was with them, and yet had never said a word about it. The camera lingers coolly in the background as Tenoch gets up and Julio offers to pay, as the shock seems to sever the last thread of connection that had stood between them. Nunca volverán a verse, notes the narrator. They will never see each other again.
Luisa submerges herself into the ocean, and so into a kind of symbolic death - but surely into life, too; a life lived not in her unhappy marriage or bored middle class restraints, but one inhabited autonomously, licentiously; a life lived freely. Cuarón crafts a love letter to the search for this freedom: to the habitation of a world that, on the surface, reprimands physicality, and yet that must ultimately be explored through sensation. Love - romantic, sexual, platonic, forbidden, restrained, un-sanctionable - is found in the intertwining of physicality; human connection manifested not in a church or a marriage contract, but rather in the pure and simple spilling over of bodies. In denying ourselves of them, in resisting as eventually Tenoch does, life surely becomes a type of living death. A perpetual drowning, if you will. That same old warning comes ringing in our ears as the film cuts to black.
Life is like the surf. Give yourself away like the sea.
