Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También

Abandoned by their girlfriends who went to Italy with their families to spend the summer vacation, Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) had no channel for their hormonal pandemonium other than to masturbate themselves. In a wedding, they met Luisa (Maribel Verdul), the wife of Tenoch’s cousin, and invited her for a spree to a faraway and non-existent beach called Boca del Cielo (Heaven’s Mouth). Stunned by her husband’s infidelity, Luisa took Julio and Tenoch’s invitation. They then headed to Mexico and trekked a road toward fictional destination.

Along the way, Luisa taught Julio and Tenoch about life, love, sex, and living, and it was she who seduced the two horny young men not the other way around. She provoked them to rivalry and to mutual recrimination until she burst the bubble of their masculinity by criticizing their sexual pleasure. She told them that the greatest pleasure comes from giving pleasure to others.

At a motel, Tenoch stepped out of the shower room, grabbed a towel, put it around his waist, and asked Luisa some shampoo. Instead of giving a sachet or two, the latter asked the first to drop the towel. When she brushed her mouth against his crotch, the scene had sensuality that was either mechanical or pornographic. Julio, who peeked at the two, was turned on and felt an unexplainable jealousy. Later, when Tenoch leaved Julio and Luisa in the car, the first groped the latter like panting adolescent, his hands and mouth all over her breasts. Luisa compensated the careful balance of Julio and Tenoch’s friendship. It became clear that the two boys were not jealous of their relationship with Luisa, but rather with each other.

If Luisa’s sexual greediness appeared inexplicable, there was an explanation. Her tartness became part of a whore complex laid bare by a final revelation. She turned Julio and Tenoch into masculine beings as they accepted themselves as “milk brothers” because they slept with each other’s girlfriends on numerous occasions. The movie was entitled Y Tu Mama Tambien because Julio also slept with Tenoch’s mother, an encounter that the latter responded coldly with boisterous laughter.

Julio and Tenoch were not different with their Asian and American counterparts. At the very least, they were conscious of their homosexual desires beneath their heterosexual friendship. In the movie’s most delirious (or delectable) sequence, they masturbated, saw who cum first, and illustrated their hidden homosexual desire. They were hormone-raging teenagers who were very horny and who loved to share and to discuss their homoerotic experiences.

One night, when all of them were heavily drunk, Julio, Luisa, and Tenoch engaged in ménage à trios that culminated into a homosexual encounter. Nagladlad ng kapa ang magkaibigan sa harapan ni Luisa. They came off as queers at that moment. Given their previous homoerotic experiences, the scene was not beyond the realm of possibility, but given the emotional setting that they are in bed with a woman, Julio and Tenoch’s homosexual encounter was unimaginable. Kinawawa at ginawang salingpusa si Luisa. However, the homosexual experience did not make them homosexuals; it made them queers because of the homosocial environment they are living. On the contrary, the resentments that they felt toward each other underscore a homoerotic attraction.

Honestly, I was inundated by the sexual tension among Julio, Luisa, and Tenoch. At one point, I even asked one of my classmates whether Julio was a gay or not. Julio and Tenoch’s reaction after realizing that they had homosexual encounter was very foreign. In the Philippines, that night of love and sexual bout and pleasure could have been the culmination of a wonderful homosexual relationship or a wonderful homosocial relationship perhaps.

Julio and Tenoch could be considered “patron saints of sexual generosity” because sexual honesty is a perilous road not taken, inviting accusations of voyeurism and shallowness. The movie celebrated adolescent horniness both heterosexual and homosexual. It illustrated the lives of two young men, the discovery and re-discovery of their sexual identity and orientation, and the revelation of who they are and who they will be in the future. In the lives of Julio and Tenoch, there was no redemption, but there was a clear message of their aspirations in life and their understanding of a heterosexual friendship in a homosocial environment.

Truly, the movie promise erotic freedom and sexual liberation.