Y tu mamá también in Illinois

On Sunday evening, Alfonso Cuarón’s sultry road movie Y tu mamá también (2001) will roll into the Wilmette Theatre in Wilmette, Illinois. After helming two Hollywood productions that focused on the process of growing up—an imaginative adaptation of the children’s novel A Little Princess (1995) and a modern-day spin on Dickens’s Great Expectations (1998)—Cuarón returned to Mexico to make an altogether more explicit kind of coming-of-age film. In Y tu mamá, two horny adolescents (Diego Luna and Gabriel García Bernal) decide to escape their native Mexico City, along the way picking up a mysterious married woman (Maribel Verdú) with whom they form an increasingly intense erotic and emotional bond. Both a critical and box-office sensation, the film not only confirmed Cuarón as one of Mexico’s most exciting contemporary auteurs, it also launched Luna and Bernal to international stardom and helped crystallize the hovering handheld style that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki would take to dazzling new heights in his later bigger-budget collaborations with the director. For a closer look at this provocative yet bittersweet tale of self-discovery, check out the liner notes for our release, in which Charles Taylor praises the film’s “unabashed impulse toward life.”