The Kingdom of Shadows

Y Tu Mama Tambien is a beautiful film, and honestly one that I am still puzzling over. In order to facilitate that puzzling I'm going to give away the surprise ending, and its enough of a surprise ending that one shouldn't continue reading unless you've seen the movie (which you should do... unless you are against sex).



I am eager to read this film as a "what would you do if you knew you were going to die" story, which could lead me to a lot of nice places. I am particularly interested in what draws the men and woman of this story together (speaking sexually of course), and I find it quite nice that the woman finds having sex with two young men to be more "real" then spending the time with her husband. Whether or not the film is, in total, an existentialist story, its answer to the existentialist dilemma is a rather interesting one.

I say that, because the film begs the question, what exactly is more "real," about these two boys than her husband. Though the director is obviously signaling this at certain points (she is going to tell her husband she is dying, he interrupts her and tells her he cheated on her), ignoring those obvious "he's a bastard" markers (which are always rather shallow, no one can be as big a bastard in real life as men in film have to be), the film wants to signify less blatantly that the careless sexual relationship has something of the religious in it, that cannot be properly encompassed by a socialized relationship.

Though I mean no disrespect to the religious people who are reading my blog, the concept of an "afterlife," typically considered, somewhat cheapens the idea of life in general. The woman in the film, and thus the film in general since the story is completely sympathetic to her, aims to experience life as bodily as possible, and thus as physically as possible. She attempts to experience beauty (sex with rather attractive young men) in the context of its constant erasure (death).

In this reading the message would be wholly pagan, and at the same time tragic (in the sense of Greek tragedy), because life is constantly being measured by the end annulment of its value.

In the Greek tragedy though there is always the prospect of history remembering you, and really, the truest tragedy is the memory of a person's disappearance to time. The boys do not learn any lessons from the woman, and the hedonism of the two weeks with all the accompanying "magical realism" is a matter for shame between the two of them. The only thing that remains of the woman is a mystery about what she was trying to say, like a ghost signaling without being heard.

I believe there might be a political message to the film as well, though I don't know what it is.