Part of the Picture: Mr. Know-it-all tells it all
MR. KNOW-IT-ALL TELLS IT ALL
MAY 10, 2008 - ALFONSO CUARÓN’S Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN IS SEVERAL MOVIES
for the price of one – a Spanish sex comedy about teenagers looking to get laid while their girlfriends are away; a coming-of-age drama set against the social mores of a developing country; the story of a woman attempting to cope with the cards she’s been dealt; an ode to the joys of unbridled carnality in the face of the cold inevitability of death – but its easiest, most facile categorisation is as a road movie. This is, after all, the story of Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal) driving off – apparently through the dusty highways of Mexico; actually into the great unknown – with the older, wiser, sexier Luisa (Maribel Verdú).
But unbeknownst to them, there’s a fourth person tagging along – an omniscient narrator, a dispassionate chronicler (of their pasts, their shared present, and their futures) whose observations seem, at first, tangential, until you stand back and see that these loose bits have come together in a sacred mosaic of nothing less than Life itself. At the beginning, in the middle of Tenoch’s frantic coupling with his girlfriend Ana, he seeks a little-boy’s whiny assurance that she won’t sleep with “a Mexican hippie,” nor with “a pretty little French guy,” or indeed anyone else while on vacation – and the narrator chips in, “Ana’s mother, a divorced French woman, a teacher at the Foreigners’ Institute, didn’t object to Tenoch sleeping with her daughter.”
But it was different for Julio. “It wasn’t noticeable, but Cecilia’s father, an allergy specialist, feared that her relationship with Julio went too far beyond.” And while we see why this so – because Tenoch and Julio are from opposite sides of the tracks, because Tenoch is the desirable son of a Harvard economist (who’s now an official in the government) and Julio’s mother has always been a secretary in a corporation – we only truly know about the gulf that divides them when the narrator lets us in on the fact that Tenoch “used to lift the toilet cover with his foot at Julio’s.” Clearly, sometimes, friendship means never having to bring up the subject of personal hygiene.
After seeing their girlfriends off, and on the way back from the airport, Tenoch and Julio yelp with the joy of pups who’ve snapped their leashes. They complain about the traffic holdup, and console themselves that it’s probably due to a demonstration, and that there’d at least be “nice chicks” among the protestors. But the narrator knows there’s no such luck, for though three demonstrations did take place that day, the jam was due to a pedestrian having been hit by a truck. “Marcelino Escutia, an immigrant carpenter from Michoacán.” He never used the pedestrian bridge because it forced him to walk two extra kilometres to get to the building yard. “His unidentified body was recovered and brought to the mortuary. It was claimed four days later.”
Unaware of Escutia’s fate – and in all fairness, unaware of Escutia’s very existence – Tenoch reaches home. Then, with Julio listening, along with another friend who’s rolling joints for a party that evening, he goes into raptures about what exactly he’d like to do to Miriam, where he’d like to bite her, how he’d like to take her. Later, when a similarly explicit confession erupts in the car, when Tenoch and Julio and Luisa are on the road, the narrator, again, has his mind on other things, another accident. “Had they passed by there 10 years earlier,” he reveals, “they would have run across a couple of cages in the middle of the road. Then across a cloud of white feathers. Shortly after, more crushed cages, with dying chickens. Later on, an overturned truck, surrounded with smoke. They’d have seen two inert bodies on the ground, the smaller one covered with a jacket.” The narrator stops as suddenly as he started, and it’s back to the present, back to the people in the car, one of whom is itching for another cigarette.
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