Y Tu Mamá También

Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón 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 García 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 Mamá También 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 film’s apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment.

Smith suggests Y Tu Mamá También 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 Cuarón’s film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.

Paul Julian Smith is Distinguished Professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the Graduate Center in City University of New York, USA.
A Fellow of the British Academy and the former Professor of Spanish in the University of Cambridge, UK, he is the author of 23 books, amongst them the BFI Film Classic on Amores Perros (2003), His most recent books are Spanish Lessons: Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain (2017), Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000 (2017), Spanish and Latin American Television Drama: Genre and Format Translation (2018), Multiplatform Media in Mexico: Growth and Change Since 2010 (2019), and Mexican Genders, Mexican Genres: Cinema, Television, and Streaming Since 2010 (2021) He has also been a long-time contributor to the BFI’s journal Sight & Sound and was for ten years a columnist for Film Quarterly.