I found this Mexican road trip movie on Netflix a while back. I didn’t really know much about it aside from the Netflix blurb and that it’s on my 1500 “Must See” movies poster. That’s brought me some good recommendations, and it never hurts to check something out for a new experience.
Granted, I don’t speak a word of Spanish, so thank God the subtitles were good. I didn’t even know what the title meant exactly. Apparently, it means “And Your Mom, Too”.
Tenoch (Diego Luna), the son of a high-ranking government minister, and his working class friend Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) see their girlfriends off as the two ladies are taking a trip to Italy for a while. With the girls gone, Tenoch and Julio figure they can live like bachelors and try to get down and funky with other women while their girlfriends are gone. While the two teens are attending a wedding, they encounter Tenoch’s older cousin Jano, a novelist. Jano is a bit of a dork, but he does have a very attractive wife named Luisa (Maribel Verdu). Sure, she’s married to Tenoch’s cousin, older than them, and they have girlfriends, but that doesn’t stop Tenoch and Julio from asking if she’d like to go with them to a distant beach that they aren’t even sure exists.
Though she initially declined, Luisa changes her mind when a tearful Jano confesses over the phone that he cheated on her. Now Julio and Tenoch have an older beauty that wants to take a road trip to a beach they may have made up. There have probably been worse reasons to go on a road trip.
Director Alfonso Cuaron has something here that doesn’t really fit into any given category. Julio and Tenoch are acting like a pair of guys out of a sex comedy, and Luisa may or may not be willing to oblige them. Luna and Bernal, longtime friends before they made the movie, have good chemistry as longtime pals looking just to get laid. Sure, they seem like a pair of assholes, but they’re also teenage boys trying to look far more, shall we say, proficient then they actually are, so that fits. Verdu’s Luisa is far more complex than the boys initially take her for, someone going with them willing to give anything a try and looking to experience as much as she can. When she’s finally had enough of the way the boys eventually turn on each other, she tells them some harsh truths they weren’t expecting, making the overall trip better for all three…for a while at least.
Meanwhile, Cuaron employs a narrator whose job seems to be either to tell the audience the things the different characters are unwilling to share with each other or the disastrous futures different people have. Between that and how the trip ends for Tenoch and Julio, the final tone is one of growing up and leaving a more carefree childhood (and the friendships they had during those periods) behind. By the movie’s end, Tenoch and Julio are visibly different young men who learned more about themselves than they probably ever wanted to know, even if they probably needed to know it.
Grade: A
0 Comments