Y Tu Mam Tambin

Y Tu Mam Tambin (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarn and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists Gael Garca Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global cinema. Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and Penthouse fantasy of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mam Tambin not only addresses with playful seriousness such major issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now than they were on its release; but that the films apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment. Smith suggests Y Tu Mam Tambin remains an example for world cinema of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarns film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.