Y Tu Mam Tambin

(Paperback)

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Y Tu Mam Tambin (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarn and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists Gael Garca Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global cinema. Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and Penthouse fantasy of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mam Tambin not only addresses with playful seriousness such major issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now than they were on its release; but that the films apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment. Smith suggests Y Tu Mam Tambin remains an example for world cinema of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarns film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.

Reviews

[An] illuminating study. -- Miranda France * Times Literary Supplement *
Smith writes with the fluency of an award-winning journalist and the analytical sharpness of the leading academic that he is. This is an essential and highly readable book for anyone who wants to learn the story of Y tu mam tambin and understand how it has become a classic film of Mexican and international cinema. -- Deborah Shaw, University of Portsmouth, UK
Paul Julian Smith combines a breadth of knowledge of Mexican film with insights from online fan cultures in this broad ranging, distinctive, and highly readable book. It is a must for those studying both Y tu mama tambin and Mexican film culture. -- Niamh Thornton, Liverpool University, UK
Paul Julian Smith has written the essential book on what I consider to be Mexicos best film of the century so far. With a deep knowledge of its production and circulation, this book provides readers not only with a comprehensive study of Y tu mam tambin, but also with a model on how to write a book that is at the same time rigorous and readable. -- Ignacio M. Snchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis, USA.

Author Bio

Paul Julian Smith is Distinguished Professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the Graduate Center in City University of New York, USA. A Fellow of the British Academy and the former Professor of Spanish in the University of Cambridge, UK, he is the author of 23 books, amongst them the BFI Film Classic on Amores Perros (2003), His most recent books are Spanish Lessons: Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain (2017), Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000 (2017), Spanish and Latin American Television Drama: Genre and Format Translation (2018), Multiplatform Media in Mexico: Growth and Change Since 2010 (2019), and Mexican Genders, Mexican Genres: Cinema, Television, and Streaming Since 2010 (2021) He has also been a long-time contributor to the BFIs journal Sight & Sound and was for ten years a columnist for Film Quarterly.