If a great cinematic experience is one that takes you to another place for two hours, then a great cinematic road movie should take you through many places with the final destination being a place where you never want to arrive. And Your Mother Too succeeds in transplanting the viewer into the dusty countryside of Mexico, but more importantly it invests the journey with great emotion and humour.
Tenoch and Julio are typical movie adolescent dropouts, permanently stoned, masturbating or on the look out for sex. Whilst their girlfriends are in Italy they try to impress Tenoch's attractive older cousin, Lucia, by boasting of a trip they are about to take to the perfect beach. When Lucia decides to join them on their trip the boys have to cover up the fact that the place doesn't exist, while all three try to deal with their relationship problems.
Though the premise and characters are fairly standard for the genre, it is refreshing to see horny adolescents portrayed without the faecal fascination of Hollywood teen comedies or the over-powering bleakness of indie films such as Larry Clark's Kids. Tenoch and Julio are as immature as they come but there is a emotional depth to the performances that allows their insecurities to resound through their smutty jibes at one another in ways that teen performances rarely achieve.
Much has been made of the films explicit sex sequences which leave Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful looking positively prudish. However they all drive the plot forward and the coldly unemotional camerawork is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut in it's ability to rise above any cheap titillation that the sequences provide to convey the visceral emotion between the characters.
The films unseen narrator guides the viewer along the journey in a wandering style that often deviates completely from the plot to detail the history of people and places who only appear briefly in the film. This conceit has been used before in both Amelie and Run Lola Run, but here he fast cut montages are replaced by lingering shots into the distance, as if the film itself has started daydreaming. This relaxed style emphasizes the richness of the world the protagonists pass through without ever becoming distracting or rambling.
The hand held camera work helps to give a down and dirty feeling of the run down locations and frames some wonderful images of the Mexican landscape without ramming them down your throat in unnecessary close ups or montages. This ambivalent direction means the viewer is not driven to make immediate emotional decisions about the characters or events and creates an ambiguous piece which will say deeply different things to different people.
Despite a downbeat ending And Your Mother Too is infused with so much humour and joy that it never feels like an ordeal. It's ability to allow the viewer to project their own experiences onto it's slender plot makes it a thoroughly absorbing piece that will linger long in the memory of those who are wise enough, or lucky enough, to see it.