Y Tu Mamá También

Y tu mamá también is a very good film because it seems much simpler than it really is. At first glance, it can be seen as a sexual, free, provocative and youthful road movie, with two friends setting off on a trip with an older woman. But beneath that surface of desire, jokes, adolescent clumsiness and Mexican heat, there is a much sadder, sharper and more adult film.

Alfonso Cuarón gives the film enormous vitality. Everything seems to move: bodies, the car, conversations, the road, the country in the background. There is sex, humor, friendship, jealousy, class tension, politics, death and a melancholy that enters slowly, almost without warning. The film never remains only erotic or only generational. It is both things, and something more: a portrait of a moment in life when you still do not know that some things, once broken, never return.

Maribel Verdú is wonderful. Luisa could have been simply "the desired woman", the sexual engine of the trip or the adult fantasy of two young men. But Verdú gives her a mixture of mystery, tiredness, freedom, pain and tenderness that makes the character the true center of the film. She is beautiful, of course, but above all she is full of truth. Every look of hers seems to hide something the two boys are still unable to understand.

And the two friends are excellent too. Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna have an incredibly natural chemistry, full of real friendship, trust, shared stupidity and hidden rivalry. They are funny, immature, arrogant, fragile and sometimes quite pathetic, exactly as they should be. The film does not idealize them. It looks at them with affection, but also with cruelty. They are young, they desire, they boast, they lie, they compete and they understand almost nothing of what is in front of them.

One of the film's great strengths is that the journey is never isolated from the country around it. Mexico appears at the edges: in checkpoints, villages, inequalities, news reports, and in people who cross the frame and continue their lives. The film does not turn all this into a heavy speech, but leaves it there, as a reality the protagonists often barely notice. The dry, almost documentary-like narrator opens the film toward something larger than the sexual adventure of three people.

There is also something beautiful and painful about the passing of time. What begins as a naughty escape ends up becoming something else: a farewell, even if they do not know it yet. Friendship, desire, youth and innocence all have an expiration date. And Cuarón tells it without turning it into a sermon. A gesture, a confession, a look, or that ending is enough to leave a strange sadness, the kind that does not need underlining.

Y tu mamá también is sensual, funny, political, sad and deeply human. It has the energy of a young film and the gaze of someone who already knows that youth ends. Maribel Verdú is perfect, but Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are magnificent too. A Mexican film full of blood, skin, road and memory. One of those films that seem to be about sex and end up being about life itself.