Red-Hot Mama ~ August 16, 2002

Diego Luna is not surprised when I ask him what it's like to wear a prosthetic penis. "I'm asked that question a lot," the 22-year-old star of Mexican film Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) says with a laugh. "It was a condom with a little head. It was very uncomfortable to wear. In the shower scene it was tough, because the water was getting in. It started to get bigger, and bigger, and bigger."

I must hasten to add this was not the intended effect. Luna did not have to wear the prosthetic because of any, ahem, size issues, but because his character was meant to be circumcised and he was not. "I'm from a hippie family", he cheerfully explains.  In the shower scene in question, he teases co-star Gael Garcia Bernal about his uncircumcised penis, and there are several other scenes in which he appears nude. So many, in fact, that the film has an R rating here, in Mexico and Britain. In New Zealand, the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards tried unsuccessfully to have it banned.

But what do you expect? asks director Alfonso Cuaron, of a movie about two 17-year-old boys? Like most teenage males, Julio (Bernal) and Tenoch (Luna) are, in the words of one reviewer, "young, dumb and full of come". They are obsessed with sex - how to get more of it, rather than how to do it properly. The film opens with two of the briefest sex scenes in movie history, all blurred buttocks and slack-jawed concentration as they say frenzied good-byes to their girlfriends before the holidays. The boys are left to look after themselves - and they do, wrists pumping furiously as they lie on parallel diving boards - until they meet 28-year-old Luisa (Maribel Verdu) at a wedding, and she takes them up on their offer of a trip to the beach. We find out she has reasons of her own for this, but by then the trio has already embarked on an increasingly sombre road trip to more sex, death, and the pain of growing up. It proved a winning formula in Mexico and Latin America, and even in the US, where the film grossed $US14 million, seven times its tiny $US2-million budget. Critics, too, have liked it. It was nominated for best foreign language film at the Golden Globes this year and won best screenplay at last year's Venice Film Festival, with Luna and Bernal sharing the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best newcomers (presumably, no pun was intended).

Combined wh the earlier success of Amores Perros - which also starred Bernal and won a pile of awards, as well as an Academy Award nomination in 2001 - the film has brought international recognition to the Mexican movie industry. Two hits is a considerable strike rate in a country where maybe 10 or 15 films are made a year - "And that's a good year", says Luna.  The warm reception has also changed the fortunes of the two young stars, who now have roles in big Spanish and US films, while Cuaron - who moved to Hollywood after his 1991 film, Love in the Time of Hysteria, and made A Little Princess and Great Expectations - seems likely to move up another notch in the movie business when he directs Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004.

Despite the Hollywood connections, however, Y Tu Mamá También remains a quintessentially Mexican film. Cuaron's vision of Mexico as a poor, corrupt and brutal place is almost as integral to the film as the three main characters. In one scene, as Luisa explains to the boys a more esoteric sexual technique, the camera drifts to three policeman beating up someone by the side of the road. In another, a deadpan voice-over tells us a happy-looking fisherman will soon lose his livelihood when a big hotel buys up the local beach.

"Mexico is a teenage country trying to seek its identity as an adult country, same as the characters," says Cuaron. This parallel is what distinguishes the film from other rites-of-passage stories, and partly explains why Cuaron and his brother, Carlos, who wrote the script together, wanted to make the film in Mexico, not the US. As he puts it, in typically colourful language: "America is a pre-pubescent country, just starting to discover masturbation. As a country, it's starting to discover masturbation and a couple of pubic hairs, and they want to show them off everywhere."

But, Cuaron says, there was a price to be paid for the unflattering portrait of Mexico. The government funds almost all films in Mexico, and Cuaron had previously argued with them over the distribution of Love in the Time of Hysteria. "The bureaucrat in charge, the guy in charge of cinema in Mexico, he told me nobody gives a shit about Mexican films. Not even in Mexico."

Cuaron proved him wrong when he organised his own distribution and Love in the Time of Hysteria became the highest-grossing film in Mexico that year, and did surprisingly well abroad. But his chances of continuing to work in his home country were severely dented, and he moved to the US as soon as he could. Y Tu Mamá is his first film in Mexico for almost a decade.

He maintains it was the authorities' ire, rather than the sex scenes that led to the film's R rating there. Despite the fact that other countries, including Australia, have also restricted it, he sees the rating as censorship in another guise, more proof that the old, autocratic ways are still "like a cancer in the system" of modern Mexico. "Put it this way: rock concerts were forbidden in Mexico until seven years ago," he says, somewhat enigmatically.

Cuaron is more persuasive when he defends the inclusion of so many stark, unsentimental sex scenes on the grounds that they are true to life. Luna, still in his teens when it was filmed - agrees. "How can you make a movie about teenagers without showing sex?"

When we speak, Luna is in Calgary, Canada, filming Open Range, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, with Robert Duvall and Annette Bening. It's a big step up from the soap operas that used to be his bread and butter, as they are for almost every Mexican actor, and he's clearly delighted with his good fortune. "I have a maid, now. I have a coach. I have a lot of stuff that you don't need if you work in Mexico!"

Some of the exuberance we see on screen in Y Tu Mama is clearly real, as is his friendship with Bernal. "Our fathers were friends, so we have known each other since I was born," says Luna. This was especially helpful when creating the characters' high-intensity banter, which forms the backbone of the film. "I think we've given to the characters a lot of codes and a lot of the chemistry that is between us. But also we were acting a very different relationship. I think we are a bit more intelligent than the characters."

Luna's exuberance extends to the sex scenes, too, which he says were fun to do - including the threesome at the end. He credits Verdu, best known for her role in Belle Époque, for this. "This girl was so beautiful, we felt like two little fools in front of her. But she made everything really easy. I mean, these scenes would be really tough with an actress that was worrying about the lighting, that was nervous all the time, but she was so relaxed. She would show you where the hand had to go, and where to put it, and that's it," he says, laughing. "We really had a good time."  His only disappointment is that after enduring the discomfort of the prosthetic penis, its effects are barely noticeable on the final video. "If you see it on tape, it looks so little! I prefer to watch it on the big screen. I feel better with myself."

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