Y Tu Mama Tambien

There's a lot to like about Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. It tackles serious concerns in a serious way, it gives us honest and multidimensional characters, and it manages to infuse the tropes of the road trip movie with a pathos and insight not normally found in the genre. Unfortunately, however, it failed to capture my imagination.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is a story about two young men and one fully adult woman. It blends coming of age, sexual maturation, and class concerns seamlessly, but it does so on a level so accessible that it opens itself to accusations of oversimplicity. Yes, we get that the young need to find themselves, intellectually and physically - we've been there. Yes, we get that rich and poor inhabit entirely different worlds - what else have you got? And yes, we understand that the world is soaked in tragedy - so what? This is a movie that, on first viewing, seems far too easy to decode. Perhaps there's more to it, but I saw this one solo and am stuck with my own impressions.

While Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN's insights may seem all too obvious, the film still earns significant credit for fully realizing its characters. Sure, the adolescents are horny kids, but they're horny kids with real hearts, concerns, and questions about themselves and their place in the world. Sure, the woman is the very personification of the madonna-whore, but she's given a level of humanity and an internal (and internalized) journey that's far more profound than that normally found in coming of age films. I didn't really like these people. I didn't really relate to these people. But I believed in these people. And that ain't bad.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is basically a road trip movie, but it's a movie that understands the tedious nature of the road trip, that uses the tropes of the genre to great effect, and that feels for every character on the screen. As its trio of protagonists pass through their various challenges, the film uses those challenges and situations to explore the nature of maturing sexuality and, hell, maturing period. This film "gets it" in a way that so many do not.

So, why did Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN fail to capture my imagination? It clobbered my out of the trap with its lfrequent voice-overs. It's as if the film didn't trust me to intuit pathos and, instead, beat me over the head with it. See this nice spot? People died there long ago. See these nice people? Those nasty capitalists will drive them from their home soon. OK, ok. I get it. Life is hard. Additionally, I had a philosophical problem with some of the movie's assumptions, especially the assumption that freer sex leads to greater happiness. Granted, the film did address the issue forthrightly in its denoument, but even that felt like it was too little, too late.

So, there it is. I respect Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I admire Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. But I don't particularly like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I guess you can't have it all.