Y tu mamá también

(Rough translation: So’s your mother. Or even better: Yo mama!) On the surface this is a stoner road trip: Tenoch y Julio can a la playa. Two Mexican teens, one very rich and one middle class, get involved with a woman 10 years older and set out in an old car for the beach. There is much talk about sex, and she has sex with both of them. She has a secret. But there’s more going on here. From time to time the sound goes off and an omniscient narrator gives us details of things that have happened along their route. We get the point: the divide between these well-off kids and ordinary Mexicans is deep and wide. Personally, I’d have been terrified on this trip, with fascistic soldiers all along the way, but these kids are used to it, and hardly even see all the side dramas through their car windows. It’s a good point to make … but what is it doing in this movie? It simply stops what was, to me, the main story, which is a character study of the three. The movie can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. I’m not saying it’s bad, and the director is quite a good one, he’s worked in Hollywood on movies as big as the most recent Harry Potter. Apparently a labor of love, but it didn’t quite jell for me.