In “Subtitled,” Emmett Chung ’27 explores world cinema through reviews of non-English films. 

“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” – Bong Joon Ho 

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

Before Diego Luna became a household name from “Star Wars,” he was best-known for his role in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 road trip movie, “Y tu mamá también.” Luna and Gael García Bernal — both just 21 years old at the time — co-star as two Mexican teenagers, Tenoch (Luna) and Julio (García Bernal), who embark on a road trip with an older Spanish woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú). 

People often associate “Y tu mamá también” with its graphic sexual content. While sexuality features prominently (from the very first scene, in fact), the scenes depicting sexually curious, immature and impulsive teenagers feels true to adolescence rather than gratuitous. The raunchy scenes effectively contrast the film’s broader meditations on life, friendship and roads not taken. 

Tenoch and Julio are hardly likeable. They’re vulgar, careless, misogynistic and their biggest fight happens when they discover that they each had sex with the other’s girlfriend. Yet, at the same time, they remain strangely endearing, their immaturity and sincerity reads as genuine and earnest, making them compelling protagonists nonetheless. 

The boys also seem indifferent (or oblivious) to the world around them. Tenoch comes from an upper-class political family (likely linked to the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI). In a particularly memorable scene, he refuses to touch the toilet seat in the middle-class Julio’s home. As the boys drive through rural Mexico, the film’s narrator — who occasionally breaks the fourth wall with a voiceover — notes that one of the villages they pass was the childhood home of Tenoch’s nanny. Yet beyond these select moments, the boys’ different social classes never affect their relationship. 

The third and most enigmatic character is Luisa, who, being from Spain, is both outsider and catalyst. Tenoch and Julio are both immediately and intensely interested in her, and she decides to go with them after her husband admits to an affair. While she sometimes acts like a role model, at other times the authority that should come with being older vanishes, such as in a critical scene where she initiates sex with Tenoch, and Julio sees. Luisa later has sex with Julio, causing jealousy in the two boys and sparking the aforementioned fight when each admits that they have had sex with the other’s girlfriend. Luisa, reclaiming her role as mediator and authority figure,defuses the situation by scolding them as immature. 

Though Luisa’s role vacillates between that of a peer and a parent, in light of her fate, the film nevertheless emphasizes her agency — her sexual advances towards Julio and Tenoch were her decision, not the result of their actions. Luisa is not the mere object of their desires, but a fully developed character whose presence holds together the boys’ fraying relationship.

The film ends not with the end of their journey, but with a flash-forward to when Tenoch and Julio run into each other a few years later. Their conversation over coffee is a familiar type of awkward: the kind of conversation that limps along after both parties have implicitly realized too much has changed and no longer wants to be there any longer; the type of conversation I’ve increasingly experienced when trying to reconnect with high school friends.

Then, Tenoch reveals that Luisa died of cancer not long after the trip — and that she knew the entire time. Since the audience only learns this fact at the end of the film, we must reconsider the events leading up to this point, which only invites more questions than answers. Why did  she choose to spend the final months of her life with two teenage strangers? 

Tenoch announces he needs to meet his girlfriend, exchanges pleasantries with Julio and leaves. The narrator concludes: “Nunca volverán a verse,” or “They would never see each other again.” Julio asks for the check, and the credits roll. 

In retrospect, Tenoch and Julio’s profanity, sex and drug-filled romp appears to be the swan song of their friendship and of their youthful carelessness. The final scene infuses what would otherwise be a more irreverent film with bitterness at the fact that two people’s lives permanently diverged after the years of friendship we didn’t see. 

The longer I’ve been at Stanford, the more I have confronted the same fleetingness. When will the narrator of my life, unknown to me, add after a seemingly inconsequential interaction: “Nunca volverán a verse?”

“Y tu mamá también” meditates not on the more well-trodden ground of familial or romantic relationships, but on friendships, which can feel less important than the former two. By building up the boys’ relationship and knocking it down with a dose of reality — both through their separation and Luisa’s death — Cuarón invites us to ask if we can take friendship for granted when it’s so fragile, because life is so unpredictable. Luisa “united them, then she disappeared, and they disappeared from each other’s lives,” said Verdú in a 2021 interview.

Something, however imperceptible, changed for both Tenoch and Julio between their trip and their final meeting. People change and paths inevitably diverge. But don’t the ghosts of friendships past, the friendships we had as a version of ourselves we wouldn’t recognize today, still shape who we’ve become? 

You can find “Y tu mamá también” on Netflix with both English and Spanish subtitles.