Alfonso Cuarón’s film Y tu mamá también, starring Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, and Marilu Verdú, became a film festival darling, winning the Best Screenplay award in Venice in 2001 and is now regarded as a classic of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano.
The story kicks off with a pair of best friends, teen boys from Mexico City, Tenoch (Luna) and Julio (García Bernal), from wildly different social and economic backgrounds, proposing a beach road trip to an older woman, the pretty Luisa (Verdú). The three embark on a journey in search of the so-called Boca del Cielo (“Heaven’s mouth”) beach.
The film portrays everything you would expect of a road trip led by two teenage boys: rest stops, bad jokes, crummy motels, stories of girls, talk of sex, etc. Before leaving the city, Luisa had gotten the news that she is actually dying of cancer and that her failed-writer husband is cheating on her; this is what makes her take up the doe-eyed boys’ road-trip proposal. What starts off as masking her unresolved grief turns into an act of denial and distraction vicariously through the boys. Luisa tries to embalm her sadness by seducing them both, separately, during the trip, which causes fights between Julio and Tenoch.
In a retrospective review of the film, Digital Spy calls it a “bisexual masterpiece” that has become the blueprint for “lusty threeways”, as seen in recent films such as Challengers. Julio and Tenoch’s co-dependent friendship tilts fully towards the homoerotic. The film consistently buries these bi moments that suggest something “more-than” just friendship with their own brand of machismo and homophobic comments. The boys’ attraction towards Luisa is apparent throughout the entire movie, but so is their attraction to each other.
Despite the movie receiving positive reviews from critics, many viewers in 2001 thought this movie was overtly explicit. Some critics even considered it “outrageously sexed-up” and more negative reviews even considered it pornographic due to its use of nudity and sex scenes.
One of the movie’s high points is the scene of Julio and Tenoch in a screaming match in the car after finding out they both slept with each other’s girlfriends. Luisa storms out of the car and reveals angrily that what the boys desire the most is actually to have sex with each other. Finally, at the beach. The trio reconciles and decides to enjoy the peace and quiet of the newfound space between them. On their last night at the beach, they celebrate with beers under a palapa, and Cuarón delivers the iconic scene of Luisa sauntering to the jukebox and dancing to the tune of Marco Antonio Solis´s “Si no te hubieras ido”, as all three of them dance together. Luisa leads them back to their room; the boys exchange kisses and eventually wake up together.
The whole movie boils down to this threesome, but Cuarón’s lens lingers on the boys, and Luisa is left off camera much of the time. Julio and Tenoch’s kiss isn’t portrayed as “gay panic humor” like in many sex comedies; Bitch Flicks writes that the exchange is shown as a “tender, loving, and a natural growth of their sexualities”.
Many bi viewers will relate to this movie for how realistically it portrays a young person’s first-time same-sex sexual experience. The movie does not have dialogue or narration that proclaims either Julio’s or Tenoch’s sexuality as bi, but it doesn’t have to. The foreshadowing of their flirtiness, masked under Mexican machismo, builds to this beautiful scene where these protagonists let go of the socio-cultural boundaries and expectations of their far-removed city life.
Actor Gael Garcia Bernal remembers Y tu mamá también lovingly during a 2024 Criterion Collection “Closet Picks” interview segment and says very candidly while holding a copy of the film,
I want you to tell me which film has made you horny in the last years… I miss that from cinema.
The movie ends tragically, with the boys growing apart once back in the city; Luisa dies, and Julio and Tenoch’s friendship does as well. However, the moments they shared, the discovery they made of themselves, and their celebration of life will tie them together forever.