What a disappointment this film was! And after all the reviews I read praising it, it doesn't even rate half as good as the similarly overrated "Amorres Peros."

A couple of pathetically juvenile but oh-so-cute-&-cuddly rich kids with nothing on their minds but sex, drugs & parties, bang each other's silly trollop girlfriends behind each other's backs & then, while their girlies are vacationing in Italy, take their own road vacation with a beautiful twenty-something woman from Spain who turns out to be a lot more accommodating of their desires than they expected due to the oh-so-sentimental a dark twist of an audience sympathy-inducing secret revealed at the end of the film. They travel by station-wagon through fantastically picturesque Mexican locations to a beautiful beach, all the while talking about almost nothing but their love-affairs & sex in very banal and uninteresting ways.

You can't enjoy any of the scenery in the film because the two kids won't shut up for even two seconds. They blab non-stop all through this film. I can't believe that Cuaron actually wants us to like these two morons & thinks that implying their homo-eroticism by the gay kiss in the last group-sex scene towards the end is enough satire. It's nowhere near enough & not done half as good as Blier's "Going Places," the film Cuaron has so obviously borrowed from heavily for "Y tu Mama."

There's absolutely nothing new in this film, in terms of its concept or narrative style; it's all been done before and MUCH better. The main reason it's getting all this attention is, of course, the non-stop barrage of softcore sex scenes that fill it from the very first shot to almost the very end. The film needs the crutch of some raunchy sex scene or sex-related dialogue around every turn and most of them mean zilch, in fact, much less than in Larry Clark's two ridiculously camp films "Kids" & "Bully." After a while you just become nauseated & realize you're watching nothing but a softcore porn film with fancy artsy pretensions.

The film's heavily derivative of at least two famous French films: Truffaut's "Jules & Jim" & the aforementioned "Going Places," Bertrand Blier's raunchy French sex-obsessed-hippie-buddies-on-the-run classic (the Original French title: "Les Valseuses" or "the Testicles" was too strong to put on American marqees although I'm sure it would've aroused ten times the curiosity of "Going Places") which made Gerard Depardieu a big star.

Two close friends share the same woman (Jeanne Moreau) over a period of many years in "Jules & Jim" but no simulated sex scenes could be shown in 1962. The two hippies in "Going Places" share most of their girls in the film. By 1973, Blier could show the same Jeanne Moreau in a scene of semi-simulated sex with both Gerard Depardieu & Patrick Deware at the same time. In fact, "Going Places" was full of simulated sex scenes almost as explicit as anything in "Y Tu Mama" but none of it seems half as exploitative, manipulative or merely designed to titillate as the sex-scenes in Cuaron's film. Watch the Anchor Bay DVD & compare, you'll see what I mean. Where "Going Places" uses all its sex scenes to illustrate the wider implications of its protaganists' silly but always subversive & rebelious behavior within the post-sexual-revolution 1970s society, everything in "Y tu Mama" comes off jaded, passe, almost devoid of the least amount of authentic subversive value. It's all counterfeit & phony, not even offensive, much less revolutinoary & confrontational & disturbingly dark & hilarious like Blier's film. Most of the eroticism plays somewhat kinky & vulgar & totally meaningless, like something out of an updated "Emmanuele" film with a ton of neuroses piled on (mostly the Director's own).

The fancy arch voice-over narration where certain 'futures' & 'mysterious pasts of locales' & internal histories are narrated at various short intervals is again very similar to the narration used in Truffaut's "Jules & Jim." Cuaron just copied Truffaut's stylistic & narrative structure, transposed it to his film & used his own dialogue to give an impression of bogus profundity that nothing else in his film has really earned.

So, is it worth seeing? Yes but not because it's anywhere near being a great film. Its just that the 'road-travel' format the film uses has anthropological value as a Mexican cultural artifact & takes you on an artistically viewed if annoyingly intruded upon tour of of Mexico. Also the girl doing most of the sex scenes (Maribel Verdu) has a killer body: legs, derriere, rack, the works, which automatically makes them MUCH more interesting on a pornographic level than they are cinematically.

Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age