There has been a well-publicized trend of explicit sex in a number of recent foreign films. Of course, the reason such a fact is well-publicized is because, well, everybody gets pretty fascinated by sex, especially of the explicit kind, and, for some reason, most especially of the foreign kind. Perhaps it’s that whole notion of exoticness that makes the anticipation of sweaty sex scenes all the more intense.........

...And Your Mother Too is the most recent film in the sexy sweepstakes. The film is from Mexico, and is directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who, believe it or not, has done Hollywood work (A Little Princess, Great Expectations), and is set to direct the next Harry Potter film. I suppose after directing both a children’s film, and a Dickens adaptation, and being faced with another family picture, he needed some outlet to let his wild side run free.

The story involves two kids, just out of high school, who, at the beginning of the film, are saying good-bye to their girlfriends, who are about to take an Italian vacation. Good-bye for these folks involves sex, of course, although during these sweaty interludes we get a sense of how passionate these couples really are -- one couple argues somewhat playfully about promising not to “screw” anyone else while they are separated for the summer (but no points for guessing that the boy is in fact jealous), while the other have a quickie on the girl’s bed, as a cover for the official line of looking for the girl’s passport. In other words, it’s just typical teenage sexual hi-jinks, not love.

The two guys hang out, get bored, and basically do little of anything. Then one day, they meet a woman, Luisa, (Maribel Verdu) wife of one of the guys’ cousins, at a gathering involving the Mexican President. They, being silly, and horny, teenage boys, feed her a few lines, including their fabrication of a wonderful beach called Heaven’s Mouth, in hopes that this sexy older woman will take the bait and come along. She doesn’t seem to catch on, and says that her husband would enjoy going with her.

Nothing else comes of this until the next day, when she, amazingly, calls one of the boys up, and takes them on their offer. What had happened was that, the night before, she had received a phone call from her husband, sobbing because he slept with another woman -- so this apparently forces the woman into a sort of revenge, as she takes off with these two teenage boys to God knows where for God knows what.

Actually, what does happen is a cross between a road movie, and a sex (not love) triangle, in more ways than one. The woman has sex with one guy, which makes the other guy jealous, so to make up, she has sex with the other one. The jealousies that creep up between the two guys manifest themselves in more intense ways -- they soon begin to argue constantly when it is discovered that they slept with each other ‘s girlfriends. The woman makes a scene later on, when she chastises them on their immaturity, and implies that all this fighting and all this jealousy they feel toward each other is a mask for more homo-erotic feelings. Along the way, we also get the sights and sounds of rural, impoverished Mexico.

The sexuality in this film isn’t nonstop, but it is blunt. It is also peculiar, mainly because we’ve been led, through numerous reviews, to believe that this was a serious picture, yet the sex scenes are almost like a form of pornography, although, I suppose, technically, almost all sex scenes look like pornography. For people who are uncomfortable about sex scenes, this movie may not be for them -- especially when they are witness to a scene such as when one of the guys walks in to the woman’s room to borrow the shampoo, and she asks him to take off his towel, before asking him “Do you want to see my tits?”, and “Eat me, please?”, amongst other things. The other sex scenes are similar -- they just seem to come out of nowhere, and a few of the subtitles could probably be spoken in a pornographic picture.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it does give us an explanation as to why the woman would do what she did during this movie. And that reveals a flaw of this movie -- the ending seems as if it was tagged on to give this inconsequential sex romp some “meaning”, sort of like when Russ Meyer put in all that political stuff at the end of Vixen!. The only difference being that Meyer was joking; Caurson is not. Apparently, we’re supposed to feel emotional at the end, but it was difficult, because the movie wasn’t as convincing as it could have been.

Since I seem to find myself greatly drawn to female characters in general, I could sense that a movie could be made about this woman, doing the same stuff as the woman in this movie, and could actually be emotional. But the movie would have to be about her. In this case, the movie is about the two guys, who are just silly teenagers, and the woman is both the sex object and the character who teaches them life lessons of a sort, although most all of the lessons are sexually -oriented. Or, this movie could have been just a pure sex romp, without the ending we already have. The three characters talk a lot about their sexual pasts, and I actually enjoyed the fact that this woman would be so tolerant enough and comfortable enough to listen to these guys and their unsophisticated way of speaking about sexual relationships, and to reveal to them her own experiences. The guys are in fact learning something -- they’re actually getting a woman’s input on sex, which is probably something they don’t actively search for, even in their own relationships. If it was just a fun, raunchy sex flick, with these chats, and all the sexual encounters, then it’d probably be pretty good in its own way.

But the director seems to want to have it both ways, and this also figures in the mostly pointless narration. While some of the narration does have to do with the three main characters, most of it is about extraneous characters, and sights that they encounter, that have absolutely nothing to do with the movie. Some of the commentary is political in nature, but since this is not a political movie, such comments mean nothing, since they don’t add to the story.

The fact is, that most of the raunchy material could find a home in a standard gross-out Hollywood teen flick -- the sort that biased critics call puerile trash. But because this movie is foreign, low-budget, and contains some elements of melodrama and culture, then suddenly, this is a great movie. Of course, you can have a sexy movie with all these elements, but this particular movie might have been better off without them. Overall, the sexy stuff was entertaining, but the other elements were what made me hold back on any glowing recommendations. This film was a good enough watch, but nowhere near as great as the other reviews made it out to be.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day