What Alfonso Cuarón warned us about 20 years ago

Y Tu Mamá También by Alfonso Cuarón

A road trip: Julio, from a working-class background; Tenoch, from a wealthy family. Along for the ride is Tenoch’s older cousin Luisa, recently cheated on by her husband and invited to join because the boys want to sleep with her. The film shows Mexico on the brink of the new millennium. The pre-digital world is smaller—you have to drive out to see it. But Julio and Tenoch are blind to everything outside the car windows. They’re too caught up in themselves to understand the larger context of their environment. They mostly talk about sex, they even masturbate together, and at first it seems that sex is the great equalizer—it bridges the gap between their different backgrounds.

But calling it an equalizer is a liberal centrist argument. Like claiming a pandemic brings people together just because it could potentially affect anyone. Pandemic and sex stand close when used to argue for a shared humanity. This coming-together in the smallest common denominator—the synonym of capitalism—dissolves in the film into fear of homosexuality, because that would force Julio and Tenoch to confront their inequality.

This deep inequality is especially reflected in the voice of the omniscient narrator. He explains class difference in the bathroom: When Julio visits his rich friend, he lights matches to cover up the smell. When Tenoch visits his working-class friend, he lifts the toilet seat with his foot. We’re told these details with the addition that neither of them knows this about the other. Class differences reveal themselves in the intimate. As in the film Parasite, smell becomes a class indicator, a symbol of the disgust toward poverty. But whereas Parasite approaches capitalism in an essayistic way, Cuarón approaches it poetically. While Bong Joon-ho draws a clear vertical line, Cuarón’s inequality stretches horizontally.

Cuarón enters the political realm of the body. The possibility of homosexuality exists because of the presence of life in sexuality; it is, like going to the toilet, collectively intimate. Adolescent class reality and repressed sexuality relate to reality the way the unconscious relates to the conscious—it says: Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t tell you, because I’m not aware of it myself.

Coming out, as an acknowledgment of sexual reality, becomes equivalent to exposing class reality. Through the reciprocal link between sexuality and class, resolution in one is only possible through the other. Cuarón breaks the conflict down to its foundations.

One critical mistake the viewer must not make is to ignore the historical context of the film. Otherwise, one might take away: Today, we are open to homosexuality; in a 2021 adaptation of the film, Julio and Tenoch could end up together. But that would be a fallacy. As the Mel Brooks comedy The Producers inadvertently shows, there is an economic necessity to tolerate homosexuality. Not the goodwill of the majority, but increases in productivity, customer generation, and market expansion lead to this necessity. Through the interplay of sexuality and class, the premise of Y Tu Mamá También is trapped in its time. A new adaptation would also need to reinterpret its framework for reflection.

Cuarón shows us lies, wrapped in as much cinematic realism as possible—clear camera work, minimal cuts. The sex is graphic, but not pornographic; the conversations are clumsy, the arguments silly. And as in Children of Men five years later, a truly observant, independent camera opens the world to the viewer by deliberately drifting away from the main action. Since even this cinematic realism isn’t enough, Cuarón relies on an omniscient narrator: the brutal dividing force of fate. Not fate as divine providence, but the fate of class determinism.

Cuarón could have shown us Tenoch lifting the toilet seat with his foot, or Julio lighting fragrant matches. But instead, he tells us—and more than that: he tells us that the boys don't tell. He points to the absence of what is said. Thus, he creates information that doesn’t supplement scenes like a flashback would, but permeates what is shown.

Luisa’s true motivation is only revealed at the very end of the film—and almost in passing. She is terminally ill during the trip—she is the “last person,” who doesn’t ask the final question, but the most important one: What should I do? In a small fisher family, she recognizes her ideal of silence and simplicity. The boys’ fictional travel destination, Boca del Cielo (Mouth of Heaven)—which, to their surprise, actually exists and is the fisher family's home—symbolizes both the answer to the final question and Luisa’s paradise. The narrator, who tells us that a luxury hotel will soon be built here, robbing the fisherman of his work and hiring him as a janitor, delivers perhaps the most powerful warning: Capitalism will rob you of heaven yet.