![]() ![]() And in Great Expectations, which turns Dickens’s Pip into an aspiring artist in nineties Manhattan, Cuarón transformed the hero’s ardor for the unattainable Estella into verdant eroticism. It’s the moment of deliverance that occurs in all great fairy tales turned into a catalog of pleasures, the two girls like miniature rajas basking in their sudden good fortune. In one scene, she and the young maid she has befriended awake to discover that, while they slept, a rich man’s servant took pity on them and transformed their shabby attic bedroom into a palace of silks and canopies, with plush robes and slippers and mouthwatering food awaiting them. Both A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1998) are distinguished by their rich sensuality.Ī Little Princess hums with its young heroine’s belief in the power of her imagination, the very thing that saves her from cruel treatment during her sojourn in a girls’ school. Still, perhaps they needn’t have been surprised. So a sexually explicit road comedy was the last thing American audiences expected of him. But between Sólo and Y tu mamá, Cuarón had spent a decade in Hollywood, during which he produced two sumptuous literary adaptations, of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel A Little Princess and Charles Dickens’s bildungsroman Great Expectations. Mexican audiences may have been prepared for a work like this from Cuarón, given the popularity of his racy debut, the 1991 comedy Sólo con tu pareja, detailing the adventures of an advertising lothario. It remains one of the rare happy erotic movies. Right up until its melancholy coda (whose mood is captured by the casual elegy of Frank Zappa’s “Watermelon in Easter Hay” on the soundtrack), Y tu mamá también shares this sense of joy-the joy of living rough, of sex, of camaraderie, of youth. The Miller figure, most often characterized by empty pockets, a grumbling stomach, and a hard-on that won’t quit, is also, as he says, “the happiest man alive.” Miller contended that Tropic of Cancer was “a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.” But despite the disrespect for duty and authority and piety sweating out of its every open pore, the book was also an ode-an often tender one-to the joy of living, even the joy to be found in the agony of living. And not just the turn-on of sex but also of watching an artist work without a net, and of feeling yourself alive. Watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001) is something like how it must have been to read Henry Miller in the thirties-the shock and the exhilaration, and the turn-on. ![]()
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