Mexican Hot Wax

You have to wonder if the director knows how it feels. Cuarón is best loved in this country for his 1995 film A Little Princess, a lovely, unsentimental retelling of the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel about a boarding-school student who goes from privilege to poverty. But he's best known for the movie he made three years later, the high-profile flop Great Expectations, an inert venture less notable for its fealty to the Dickens novel than for its polychromatic greens, a whirling color wheel of absinthe, emerald and opalescent bile. Neither the movie nor its stars are as bad as many reviewers insisted, but while Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow did their best, they also came off as afterthoughts to the overwrought production design. The film was a bummer, especially for what it seemed to portend for its director. Then, instead of failing further upward, as do many Hollywood inductees, securing even bigger budgets with yet more stars, Cuarón threw himself a lifeline. He landed a script worthy of his talent and, whether out of pain or wisdom, learned not to indulge his and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's visual gifts: There isn't a shot in the new film that feels like showboating, or a setup that's superfluous. Having become overly fond of art-directing the world into claustrophobic perfection, Cuarón discovered how to pull art from the messiness of life. He found the balance between the world as it is and the world as he'd like it to be, which may be why, for the first time, his characters live and breathe with such sympathetic force.

HE ALSO WENT BACK HOME. IT IS telling that both Love in the Time of Hysteria and Y Tu Mamá También, the only of Cuarón's four features to be made in Mexico, open with a man and woman screwing in bed. These scenes share a similar, unspecified point of view (the camera hovers over the couples for a nice, long, blushingly intimate look) and an infectious vibe of rollicking pleasure. There's nothing prurient about either bedroom romp, though for American viewers the juicy eroticism in each film, and the ease with which the actors throw themselves into such intimacy, only underscores the desiccated puritanism of our own movies. Love in the Time of Hysteriais a shrill, unfunny sex farce about a Lothario who mistakenly believes he's HIV-positive, but it has a looseness of form and an irreverence -- toward politics, toward sex, toward social orthodoxy -- that had gone completely missing by the director's second Hollywood production. With Y Tu Mamá También, Cuarón has returned to Mexico, to its bodies and their stories. At one point in the film, Luisa describes meeting a 98-year-old woman who remembers everything in her life since she was 5, an entire century held in her body. There are all sorts of bodies in this film -- some ripe and unbent, others stooped with age and work, each with a story Cuarón tells with passion, tenderness and not a jot of compromise. "Imagine," says Luisa, "everything she's lived." Imagine remembering all that you'velived; worse yet, imagine forgetting.

Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN | Directed by ALFONSO CUARÓN | Written by CARLOS CUARÓN Produced by SERGIO AGÜERO | Released by IFC Films | At selected theaters | Opens March 15