This 2001 Mexican literary film is not simple. It earned a lot of eyeballs with few, relatively crude erotic shots. But what made Alfonso famous in World War I was definitely not just these unspeakable pictures.
On the first weekend of the local release, it rolled 2.2 million US dollars, successfully setting a new weekend box office record for Mexican domestic films at that time. It was even snapped up by various independent distributors overseas. The following year, it was screened in many English-speaking countries including the United States. In the same year, it was nominated for Oscar for original screenplay and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
That summer, audiences all over the world were heartbroken for the two Mexican teenagers Deno and Julio who were in the film.
The 17-year-old boys Julio and Deno, a commoner child, came from a wealthy family with high power, and had been good friends for many years before entering the adult world.
De Nuo is the second son of the family. His father is an economist who graduated from Harvard University. He is now the Secretary of State and his mother is a housewife. He is keen on spiritual lectures. His parents originally planned to call him Ainan, but his father had just joined the ruling party (Revolutionary Institutional Party) in the year he was born. Under the sudden influence of nationalism, he changed the ancient Mexican name Deno for his son.
Julio is a typical urban working class. He has a mother who is a secretary and a left-wing sister who is studying at the National University of Mexico and is keen on demonstrations. His father's whereabouts are unknown.
From the beginning, Julio and Deno were people in two worlds and two camps. Julio grew up in a left-wing middle class that favored democracy and freedom, and Deno was born into the right wing in power.
Julio's sister protested against the Revolutionary Institutional Party of Deno's father.
It's just that the young people don't know or care about these things in the adult world.
Their only concern is whether their girlfriends traveling to Europe will get involved with Italian men, and how to get the beautiful young woman Louisa to agree to go to the beach they made up: the mouth of paradise.
The two hormonal-driven teenagers and the Spanish woman with a secret heart embarked on a road trip together by chance.
In just five days of travel, the two older boys discovered that each slept with each other’s girlfriends; Luisa, who slept in Deno first, mistakenly thought that Julio was jealous. To be fair, she decided to fight with Hu in the car. Leo also came in for an intimate encounter.
Louisa, struggling back and forth in grief and disappointment, saw two close friends fought over her little girlfriend. She was annoyed and decided to escape this road trip, but she was eventually caught up by the little boys and finally missed After a collision, the three of them actually came to the beach called Paradise’s Mouth.
After the end of the journey, the lives of the three of them no longer crossed, each of them embarked on a life trajectory secretly arranged for them, just like the fourth-generation fisherman A Chao who met at the mouth of heaven.
A Chao will be expelled by large-scale vacation development projects in the near future, and will be forced to become a small part in the modern vacation industry. Be a doorman, security guard or hotel attendant, and fit it into modern machines.
In order to survive, freedom is the price.
It's just that some people already know it well, and some don't know it.
If you think "The same is true for your mother" is just a simple road + teen movie, then you are very wrong.
In the last ten minutes, 200% raised the theme and quality of the entire movie, giving the previous hormonal craziness a heavy support.
Like most of Alfonso's works, they are still multi-themes, but they are naturally embedded in those details, which does not violate the harmony.
Youth growth, politics, geography, and civilian life are all small themes interspersed with them. Alfonso did not amplify one of them and blur other elements, but carefully presented all aspects of Mexican life that emerged during the millennium turmoil. The audience watched.
Youth hormones in turbulent times
Three characteristics of adolescence: hormones that cannot be suppressed, friendship stronger than love, and a strong yearning for adult life.
Youth is the process by which we gradually establish a connection with the world. At the end of this process, most people will be absorbed and integrated by social machines, becoming unobtrusive but conscientious social screws.
Those self-exploration and development, the enthusiasm for reform, the emotions that are not accepted by the society...all the will and emotions that belong to the individual and are not within the routine, are in this process, accompanied by the fierce eruption of hormones, and eventually tend to calm.
Alfonso did not place such a youth story above the empty age. On the contrary, the friendship (or love?) between teenagers, the pursuit of sex, the expectation of love, and the exploration of the adult world are all deeply affected. Deeply marked with the mark of that turbulent era.
It carries too many memories of the age, it was an era when Mexico's economy, politics, and culture were turbulent.
Since the 20th century, the long-term political stability and implementation of economic policies brought about by the single-party ruling of the Revolutionary Institutional Party made Mexico ushered in a miracle of rapid economic development in the 1940s and 1970s, but it also concealed a crisis.
The death of the new immigrants not long after the beginning of the film vaguely reflects the shortcomings of the government-led large-scale infrastructure construction, because the Revolutionary Institutional Party’s highly centralized power dominates the economy, although it played a stabilizing role in the early stage, it is also extremely prone to corruption. , Causing the quality of many infrastructure projects to be worrying.
The year Deno, Julio and Luisa set off together was 1999. In the summer of the second year of the story, at the end of the movie, the Revolutionary Institutional Party, which had been in power for 71 consecutive years, lost the presidential election for the first time. The National Action Party began their two consecutive twelve-year ruling period the following year.
Compared with the sudden change in politics, the Mexican economy was already on the verge of collapse.
In the late period of Mexico’s economic miracle, oil became a new economic growth and support point; after the oil bubble burst in the 1980s, the economy began to decline; the neoliberal reforms carried out by the ruling party were not successful, and in addition to joining the North American Free Trade Area in 1992, exports Inability to compete with cheap Asian goods, imports were dumped by American goods. Under the double blow, the entire manufacturing upgrade failed.
At the same time, there is the invasion of various new cultures and the awakening of LGBTQ rights and interests.
It is against the background of such an all-round economic and political chaos that Alfonso explored the growth trajectory of Mexican teenagers.
Deno, who once preferred his car to be confiscated to become a writer, eventually chose economics at the university according to his father's intentions. Julio, who often failed the exam, also chose biology at the community college.
Talking about their common friend and former Star Cowboy member Danny being kicked out of the house by his father, but living happily with her boyfriend, both of them are slightly embarrassed and at a loss.
On the road trip of the three of them, they even vowed to tell Louisa that they didn't mind, and in the end, they said nothing to their friends, which was the sacrifice they gave to their social coming-of-age gift.
Nothing can save the mediocre self
Times are always chaotic. Except for certain dark periods, every era is a mix of good and bad.
The best era, but also the worst era, does not only exist in Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities".
The turbulent era will eventually become the emotionless records that were read in books by latecomers, the excitement, challenges, dangers, opportunities, life and death that surrounded us at that time and can really feel. , Most of them will be erased.
Those details of life that will affect our lives, in the end, there will only be a simple textual conclusion.
Elapsed along with the time details that were erased, and the mediocre life of most of us.
We are always complaining that this is a bad era, this is a lifeless era, and we are constantly constructing irrefutable but meaningless reasons for our vulgar life choices.
Forced by life, there is no choice.
But whether life leads to different choices, or different choices create new possibilities for your life, this causal relationship, have we thought about it clearly?
Or maybe, we are clear in our hearts after all, but very few people are willing to admit and act.
I can't speculate that the only person who can truly understand your mediocre life is you.
But I know that to see this clearly, you don't need to read many books, don't need much wisdom, just a little bit of courage.
However, most of us have not been the ultimate self, and have no courage to be the better self.
More, spent his life vulgarly.
You can't live a life in turbulent times, and you can't do it in peaceful times.
As Louisa told Deno and Julio, life is like a wave, so let's go out like the sea.
Before you actually set off, you never know whether the mouth of heaven that you have fabricated in your mouth really exists.
Go to the waves, Sao Nian.
Finally, I presented the eleven oaths of the Mexican youth "Star Cowboy" alliance:
- Being a star cowboy is the highest honor;
- Do whatever you want
- Pop music is better than poetry;
- Excited (struck) at least once a day;
- Cannot sleep with the girlfriend of a member of the Star Cowboys;
- Cheering for the U.S. team is a die-hard guy;
- Long live masturbation
- Never marry a virgin;
- Cheering for the U.S. team is a die-hard guy;
- Although the truth is good, it can never help you reach a climax;
- Bastards who violate the above regulations will lose the title of Star Cowboy
The last Star Cowboy Oath Article 6/9 is purely a juvenile joke, don’t take it seriously, we are all firmly defending the rights and interests of LGBTQ groups.
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