Y Tu Mama Tambien - Sex and Sorrow

  

When my only biological child was born, I was glad he was a boy.  I was scared to death about navigating adolescence with a daughter – in part because adolescent boys (not to mention creepy older guys) just seemed so dangerous.  Having been gifted with two adolescent stepdaughters, their self-awareness is a bonus – and the lack of it on the part of most of the reluctant son’s friends (he seems to be an exception – or maybe just hiding it from me well) should have given me more pause about having a son – and this movie would have clued me in had I seen it when it first came out in 2001.  I didn’t see it then because the trailers made it seem raunchy, which it is, but what the trailers didn’t capture was that the raunchiness is one the more realistic integrations of sexuality and, in one moment, sensuality into a film that I have seen.  Somehow these Mexican filmmakers have allowed their adolescent males’ sex lives to be part of their lives – and this has led the film not to be tawdry but rather deeply human.

It is not just sex that is realistically portrayed, but a country that has a small elite ruling and moneyed class, a small middle class and a very large indigent population – and it notices – off to the side - many of the class tensions that are inherent in that structure – a structure that in my worst moments it feels like our current government is hurtling us towards (shortly before we saw this film the new tax code was passed that seems like a handout to the rich and a guarantee that avenues for the other classes – including good education and health care - to rise will have to be even further closed off to pay for the largesse). 

The film begins with two buddies having very different but similarly hurried, though very affectionate sex with their respective girlfriends before those girlfriends go off together to spend the summer in Italy.  The boys reassure themselves that they will have a great time getting laid a lot while they are away while also reassuring themselves that their girlfriends will be faithful.  They then fall into a summer lassitude where they are largely hanging out with each other.  Tenoch's (Diego Luna) father is a the Secretary of Economics in the doomed PRI party that has held power for 71 years but that will fall in the next election.  Because of his father’s position, Tenoch lives in a lavish mansion with servants who don’t just wait on him but care for and about him – he is a little prince.  His father is on the board of the local country club, so he has access to it on Mondays and he and Julio (Gael García Bernal), his buddy, who lives with his mother who is a corporate secretary, have the run of the place – and it is there that they have sex – masturbating – each on his own diving board and offering images to each other that will help them orgasm.

The image that does the trick is that of an older woman – the wife of one of Tenoch’s cousins, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), whom they had tried to talk up at a wedding they both attended – a wedding where, Tenoch pointed out, the body guards outnumbered the guests.  Luisa gets a tearful phone call from her husband who confesses to having been unfaithful to her over the phone.  She then calls the boys up and lets them know that she is interested in the road trip that they have offered to the secret hidden beach called “The Mouth of Heaven” that they have boasted they know of – though in fact they have made the name and the idea up.  But, hey, you can’t pass up an opportunity like this, so they borrow a beat up car and the three go off on a road trip together to an imaginary destination.  What could go wrong with that plan?

The car trip affords them the opportunity to get to know each other – meanwhile we, the moviegoers, are introduced to the country they drive through.  And I think I failed to mention a fourth character – the omniscient narrator’s voice that tells us what is happening – with the individuals – with the country – and he points out the fates of incidental people and animals at various points – his voice is unhurried and matter of fact while foretelling various deeply concerning and even outrageous futures.  So what do we learn inside the car from this troika?  Luisa, who is married to someone with intellectual pretenses – a published author – is pleased to be mistaken by the boys as a member of the intelligentsia when she is, in fact, a dental hygienist.  She confesses that her marriage is largely empty – that she was drawn to her husband by their shared experience of being abandoned as children and we learn, over time that he has abandoned her on multiple occasions – she has been aware of previous affairs – he has just never confessed before.  We also learn that the boys belong to a society that they have created themselves in which they have pledged undying devotion to each other and imagine themselves, as the members of this secret society, as great faithful and undying friends.  And we learn everyone’s sexual histories – with the boys transparently trying to embellish their sexual prowess, which we strongly suspect is nothing but a series of hollow boasts.

On the second day out, the car breaks down and the three are stranded in a marginal hotel with a pool filled with leaves.  Tenoch goes to Luisa’s room to borrow some shampoo and she seduces him – not because of any particular attachment to him, we learn later, but because he was first through the door.  This has a tremendous impact on Julio, who is reminded of the first great betrayal of his life when he discovered his mother in the arms of his godfather.  He pays Tenoch back by confessing that he has slept with Tenoch’s girlfriend – and now Tenoch is stricken with the self-same sense of emptiness and loneliness.  The next day, to make everything right – Luisa has sex with Julio.  Of course this complicates things even further – but it also does create a certain détente – and more importantly a shared sense of emptiness and betrayal – they have all now been betrayed by someone they deeply trusted.  It also lets us know – and Luisa as well – that both boys are inexpert lovers who are too excited about the idea having sex with another person to be present to that person – and so excited that it is over almost before it begins.

Through the miracle of randomness – and as can only happen on an epoch voyage – the troupe finds its way – quite by chance – to a hidden beach that is every bit as glorious as one that they would have conjured out of thin air.  They set up camp and go swimming – and they discover a fishing family who gives them shelter at a nearby waterfront cantina and hotel.  They have a night of heavy drinking where they address all that is problematic between them – offer carnal toasts – and end up in the motel room together where the only truly sensual moment of the movie occurs.  As Luisa is pleasuring both boys – the boys kiss each other tenderly and deeply.  We cut away to the next morning where they wake up in each other’s arms and then recoil from each other.

Luisa, who has broken up with her husband over the phone, decides to stay in the fishing village and the boys have an uneventful ride home.  They drift apart and, two years later, they have lunch together – and Tenoch explains that, unknown to both of them but not to her, Luisa had cancer when they went to the beach – she knew that and knew that it was untreatable and she died two months after their trip.  The boys decide to get together again, but, the narrator tells us, they never do.

I don’t think this bare bones account of the plot can convey the depth of pleasurable melancholy that this film gave me.  I think there may be a word – triste – in French – or maybe a word in another language that conveys a pleasurable sorrow – something that feels bad – but at the same time lets you know that you can only experience this kind of sorrow if you are truly alive and care and are connected to the world and that it has disappointed you not by being something other than what you’d hoped for but by being exactly what you’d hoped for.  This trip – this coming of age moment – this shared journey – one that is deeply embarrassing to both Tenoch and Julio, because it reveals the depth of their love for each other including its erotic elements – something that was apparent to us – and to Luisa – long before that tender, sensual moment – has been expressed.  This is a rare and precious moment –one that comes all too infrequently to any of us.  And it is too much for them to bear – to know that they are, in fact, deeply in love – erotically in love – and that they are unable to handle that – on the surface because they are very straight adolescent boys, but also because as erotically attached to the world as they are the intensity of that attachment is too powerful for them to directly experience – it is too much for them to bear.  They don’t have a place to put these feelings – a category to describe it – a container for it – any more than Tenoch can bear to know the life of the servant who cares for him – to know the village that she comes from and that they drive through without looking at it.  The boys are no longer snapping towels at each other in the locker room but directly expressing all that was being playfully denied in those actions that also expressed a much more limited version of this fuller, richer and therefor intolerable experience.

Luisa’s sadness – something that she is able to communicate to each of the boys by having them betray teach other so that they can all experience it viscerally together – the sadness of losing a husband and losing her life – and deeply loving her life – and wanting to live it fully but knowing that it is limited – this all becomes shared among all three of them.  She can bear this feeling on her own no better than the boys can bear openly acknowledging their love – or their sense of being betrayed by the other.  The sadness is shared among them – she can experience it with and in them – though it is never openly acknowledged.  They are snapping a very different kind of towel together and we don’t know it – the full extent of it – until the narrator fills us in.  But we do know it – under the surface –not quite consciously – because the narrator has been telling us all along of the tragic endings that are all around – how can they not be here in the central story that we are watching?  This is not the beery bacchanal that the trailer suggests, and that this movie appears to be offering on the surface – it is not about two randy adolescents having their way with a young cougar, though it appears to be that at times to them and to us – it is three people sharing something profoundly and deeply connecting – their love of life – their love of each other – and a fragile moment that will tie the three of them together only for that moment - a moment that is both the most profound moment of connection they may ever experience – and the most profound experience of isolation they will ever know.  How privileged we are to be able to share in moments like this.  What a gift this film turned out to be.

It is a gift that I turned away from twenty years ago because I was embarrassed by what looked like an adolescent fantasy film.  Little did I know how potent adolescent fantasies can turn out to be – and how adolescent sexuality – filled with its bravado and its anxiety and its rush to nothingness – may signify something very central to the human experience more generally.  By marginalizing the sexual – by turning away from it – as we do time and again – I protected myself, as the boys were able to do early in the film – from the experience of the intensity of sorrow.   

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