Y Tu Mamá También review (2025 rewatch)
Spoilers ahead. Read my old review here.
Every year or so I like to look back at a film I’ve before because it’s insightful to see how much you evolve as a person and how differently you react to films at different points in your life.
Usually with these entries, it’s like tracing footprints in the sand, or picking an artifact up off the shelf and adding a bit of new commentary before giving it a polish and putting it back on the shelf.
But with the film Y Tu Mamá También I think I was completely off the mark the first time. I had completely ignored the role of form in favor of narrative, and only upon a second watch did I realize just how essential form was to the gestalt of the film.
"Mexico breathes with life"
Wikipedia tells you this film is about “two young men on a road trip across Mexico with a woman in her 20s” and it is, but it’s also not. And I’m not saying this in a “its philosophical themes are so much deeper than that” way; I mean that when you actually break the movie down and do a shot-by-shot sequential, you see that half of the shots do not feature the main characters at all and incorporate snapshots of random people on the street that you never see again.
Early on, Tenoch & Julio are stuck in traffic and complain it’s probably due to protesters. In the next shot, the camera pans to the accident while the voiceover tells us the holdup was caused by a man who was killed while he was walking to work.
At a pit stop, Tenoch & Julio are trying to fix their car. Luisa wanders over to a small table selling pre-owned trinkets, shrines, and framed photos. She picks up a doll with her name, to which the old lady nearby comments with a smile, “Beautiful name, Luisita.” We later learn more about the girl to which this doll once belonged to as Tenoch, Julio, and Luisa pass by a group of pedestrians walking in the same direction. The voiceover says she died while crossing the desert, looking for a better future.
While the teenagers are trying to chat up Luisa up at the reception, the voiceover announces the future actions of the president who will address the victims of a massacre, then go to a summit on globalization. The president is not mentioned again.
Why shoot the film in this way? This filming philosophy runs antithetical to the one of “cutting everything out that does not drive the plot forward.”
But this technique works if we regard the main characters as only half of the gestalt, the other half composed of sounds, sights, rhythms, and the people of Mexico itself, and see the film as a tribute to the totality of life. As the characters develop on their narrative journey, their lives intersect briefly with those of others. Sometimes they intersect for longer, such as when the fishing family invites them onto their boat. Transience and mutability are the essence of the film, as it is a way of filming that very realistically represents life.
We are predisposed to remember our lives as a series of symbolic events revolving around a core cast, but we don’t really stop to realize just how many people we encounter who touch our lives in some way. A shared smile with a stranger, a chance encounter, the discovery that you share the same birthday as someone you look up to, these are people who momentarily touch us. But the clothing we wear, the mugs we drink from — those were made by people too, and our lives are filled with reminders of them.
I have never been to Mexico. It is not my intention to comment on whether this film is an accurate representation of Mexico or not. The only thing I can say is of the impression it has painted for me in its 106 minutes of runtime of a country teeming with beauty and tragedy but most of all, ordinary people living their own full lives.
Another way of depicting this theme of interdependence is through the use of sound. Ambient sound pervades almost all scenes, including the intimate ones. Windows are open, we hear honking and rumbling traffic, or roosters and cows while the characters are playing genital Twister. And I think the interesting thing is how my acquaintance with Hollywood has given me a certain set of expectations pertaining to sound, that sound and ambience are supposed to punctuate, but never overwhelm, scenes that feature characters. We afford characters their own private room and stage where “ordinary life” doesn’t interfere, so that the words they say are amplified. Well, this movie says “screw that” by bringing in ambience where we expect none, by confining all music to in universe so that we are forced to be on the same level as the characters — and actually it’s we who are uncomfortable, not the characters themselves.
Another recurring element is the juxtaposition of life and death. How each emphasizes the other, side by side, how as close we are to one we are never far from the other.
I’ve already mentioned the man who was hit by traffic, which was a mere inconvenience to the boys’ philandering. Here are two more visual examples of life vs. death.
The first occurs at 28:27. Luisa is in her apartment waiting for Tenoch and Julio to arrive so they can depart on their trip. As she walks through the door, instead of tracking her down the steps as in a normal follow shot, the camera pulls forward, allowing a wall filled with photos of her and her husband to come between her and the viewer. It continues to track from left to right as if following her position behind the wall until it comes out through the window on the other side, where we see her greeted by Tenoch and Julio.
After having seen the film, this scene is colored for me in a different light. This is the beginning of the end. Her decision to go on the trip is what catalyzes her end (within the cause-and-effect structure of the film). But, the life, the life that literally comes in between! It really puts into perspective just how long life is, how momentous decisions such as to separate from someone can be preceded by so, so many memories.
The second occurs at 1:22:33.
The frame is literally divided in two by the presence of the door frame. On the left, Tenoch and Julio are playing a boisterous game of foosball. On the right, Luisa is pressed against the glass, talking to her husband over the phone. Luisa explains she did not [go with the boys] as revenge. She tells her husband to please not hate her. She says she loves him, and she wants their farewell to be at least affectionate.
It is a long, still shot. The only hints of movement are through the two “windows.” And notice as well the significance of the windows. Our view of the characters is mediated by a filter.
It is a shot that is drawn out for the entire duration of Luisa’s conversation. While the boys are playing a mundane little game, Luisa’s entire life is flashing before her eyes, and we can see it in her face. She attempts to convey the emotions she feels, squeezing them through tiny speaker holes in this dingy phone booth, but you really can’t condense years of emotion into a couple of minutes, and so we watch for the entire journey of her breakdown, and the camera doesn’t cut away so we’re forced to experience it with her.
Meanwhile, the boys are completely oblivious to this existential breakdown; they are fully absorbed in the minutiae of life — and hey! One of them scores a goal, and they bicker over its legitimacy.
Two halves of the same frame. Two sides of the same coin. One side dark, one side lit. One side with life, one side with death. (Luisa has terminal cancer, but we don’t know this and the boys don’t know this until a later scene.)
Subjective vs. objective camera
I had a friend talk negatively about this film for its despicable characters — she says they are crass, behave immorally and have no positive traits. As a result, she couldn’t enjoy this film. I agree that the characters behave immorally, but somehow judging the film by this feels to me like missing the point, and I was trying to figure out how. I think I know now.
I think the shelteredness and ignorance of the characters are the point. The boys are fully in the invulnerability of youth. They pursue their crass goals with such intensity that we forget for a while how vulnerable they are. The movie’s prioritization of the personal vs. impersonal, subjective vs. objective, dupes us into thinking for a second that the film really is about the small universe of the three characters. Because main characters usually have some kind of plot armor, we assume they are the driver of their own lives, and not the larger forces of fate and death. But in the end, as the omniscient voiceover suggests, people inevitably grow apart, and someone you loved could one day be a stranger, not even because of something you did.
To communicate this point, the camera switches between subjective first-person perspective (as if we were the driver behind the wheel, looking out the window at pedestrians) and long shots with the car only a blip on the horizon. The latter places the car with the three characters into perspective, and we see the scale of their little world against the rest of the world. In these latter shots, as the car meanders through curved roads, it seems to almost be swallowed up.
When we are back in the car with Julio, Luisa, and Tenoch, their conversations fill the screen and our heads. We bask in their single-mindedness and carefree jostling about. When we switch to the third-person perspective in these long shots, we hear only ambience: the roaring of engines, a steady hum of the desert. Reminding us how small we are in the grand scheme of things.
Y Tu Mamá También is a road movie. When you’re on the road, do you ever stop to really ponder the stream of traffic which contains many cars, each a universe of its own? The tragedy of car culture is that it isolates us as islands, but we are really islands among other islands.
When you bicker with people in your car, do you ever think about how many other people on their morning commute are also bickering with other people? How profoundly each of us takes our own problems, problems no one else knows or cares about?
I think it really speaks to the magic of this film that it’s able to present so many rhetorical questions to me through its use of form.
Tragic, lifelike, unforgettable.
