IF someone asked me to name my favourite film, there are several that would immediately come to mind. I would think of “Farewell My Concubine,” “The Piano,” “Mother India,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Les Diaboliques,” and even “Mulan.” Yet, the one that I always place a notch above all of the others is Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien.”

The truth about my relationship with this film begins with the fact that I lied about having seen “Y Tu Mama Tambien” for a very long time before I actually got the chance to see it. It remains a film that every film buff should see and with foreign-language titles being difficult to track down in Guyana in the recent past, I saw it much later than a lot of other people. I lied because this movie occupies a very special place in world cinema. It is iconic for many justifiable reasons, and it will remain so for many more years to come.

However, once I saw, I knew immediately that it would always hold a special place in my heart.
One of the reasons why “Y Tu Mama Tambien” is such a remarkable film has to do with its simplicity. It focuses on two teenage friends, Julio (Gabriel Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna), and a beautiful, older woman named Luisa (Maribel Verdu) who go on a road trip together to find a hidden beach named ‘Heaven’s Mouth.’ The story focuses on the relationships with these three people as they meander through Mexico, confronting each other, their pasts, and even their fates.

The road trip film is a trope that has been explored in movies for a very long time – in various ways – and Cuaron’s movie presents to us the most simple and most fascinating of them all. It is important to remember that Cuaron is the man who would later go on to direct “Gravity” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” – films backed by big budgets and laden with visual effects and flair. In contrast, “Y Tu Mama Tambien” with its small scale, simple plot, and starring actors who were relatively unknown at the time, confirms that Cuaron is as much a master of emotion and character-creation as he is a master at imparting grand visual effects and the kind of wonder that makes us go wide-eyed in his big budget movies. It is a reminder that a movie does not need to be opulent in order to be successful, entertaining, and everlasting.

Gael Garcia Bernal, as the poor and somewhat volatile, Julio, is now probably one of the best known actors from Latin America, and his performance in “Y Tu Mama Tambien” is indeed one that foresaw the continued success in acting that awaited him. His Julio is wild and unbridled, funny and a bit of a jerk, bold and yet, somehow, unsure, brimming with the kind of uncertainty and naiveté that can be found in all teenagers at some point during adolescence. Diego Luna (who would later star in “Milk” and “Rogue One”), and is good friends with Bernal in real life, served as Julio’s wealthy, preppy best friend.

His performance is earnest and strong, bursting with infectious sweetness, even as he comes across as being a bit of an annoying rich kid. The ways in which these two characters both contrasted and complemented each other throughout the film managed to impart the sort of idealism regarding who can be friends with whom that seems able to exist only in the youth of our lives, in a time before the real world of adulthood catches up with us and forces social norms and expectations and realities upon us. Their friendship, like the almost-mythic place they seek, ‘Heaven’s Mouth’, is too pure and too good to exist beyond the most temporary of phases, where one can waft on the waves for a while, but then the night comes and morning after, and it is time to be awake to go back home, to move on.

Transitions seem to be an important theme in the film. The movie is as much as about adolescence as it is about transitioning into adulthood. Julio and Tenoch engage with many aspects of the world of adults, albeit in a peripheral way, as seen when they go to the protest happening in the city, confront decisions about what career path to choose, come to terms with the facades of the adults surrounding them, and even in their engagement with the poverty that they find on the way to the paradise that is ‘Heaven’s Mouth.’

Youth transitioning to adults, the city transitioning into the countryside, the roads giving way to the sea, the boys making love to their respective youthful girlfriends and then later on with the older Luisa; there are many important transitions to observe and analyse, and the character of Luisa functions as the catalyst for many of the decisions that bring these transitions into the light. Her role is one that anchors the story, as it is Luisa, herself going through a great change as she chooses to leave her husband, who sets everything into motion.

Maribel Verdu is fiercely sensual as Luisa (fun fact: I once rounded a corner in Cartagena, Colombia, during a film festival there and almost crashed into the actress and her entourage) and her performance is one that is so good that hers is the character, despite sleeping with both boys and leaving her husband, that most of the audience will identify with. Her acting is achingly beautiful, the kind of acting that is at once restrained and pulsing with heated emotion, threatening to explode were it not for the tight control that Verdu exerts in her craft.

Luisa’s contrast with the boys comes across when we realise that, unlike them, she did not have much of an adolescence to enjoy. She was not offered the same opportunities to explore and to find herself in the way the Julio and Tenoch have managed to. Her role, at the end of the film, after she calms the storm brewing between the boys, when they all drink and dance together on the beach (in one of the most sensual scenes to ever appear in a movie), when all three of them make love together, seems to be one that was meant to urge Julio and Tenoch to embrace their youth and their lives, to explore and to live freely in a way she never did.

However, in the end, this lesson is clearly lost on the teenagers, who, horrified by the fact that they slept together, ultimately refuse to confront the truth of who are by stamping out the friendship that Cuaron used throughout the film to light up the hearts and minds of the audience who watched Julio and Tenoch and their adventures in a way that was designed to remind us all of the follies and beauty and joys of youth.

An extremely humorous film that edges the dark ever so slightly in the end, particularly when we learn of Luisa’s final transition and her final reminder to the boys to live freely and truthfully, “Y Tu Mama Tambien” emphasises the fleeting nature of time and the notion of enjoying life to the fullest.