Frisky 17-year-old best friends Julio and Tenoch are seething cauldrons of testosterone.

Frisky 17-year-old best friends Julio and Tenoch are seething cauldrons of testosterone. They struggle one-on-one in swimming contests, sexual masterys even masturbation sessions. Their biggest challenge get tos as they chase after Luisa, a muggy older woman (she's 28) whom they seduce into joining them on a road trip to the beach. Luisa diverts the tables on the lads instigating sex with each of them, confronting their devil-may-care attitudes, and at single point storming off during a fight, yelling, "What you really want is to fuck each other!"

Whether or not you believe Luisa's tossed-off accusation, Y Tu Mama Tambien--the Mexican film that relates this three-character road trip--is not your run-of-the-mill coming-of-age movie. The gay subtext that U teen comedies cause to deviate into crude humor here colors everything that happens. Near the close of the movie the sexual tension peaks in a unlooked for passionate moment between the brace boys that has audiences--gay and straight, Latino and not--shrieking in the theaters from either stroke or satisfaction.

While Y Tu Mama was released in the United States in the spring, that common galvanizing scene will likely make it the mostly talked-about film of the summer among gay viewers. Word of chaps continues to grow, as everyone wants to find abroad what the fuss is all about, to be able to take sides in the hottest whimsical cinephile debate since New extraordinary Cinema polarized gay audiences a decade ago: What really happened between Julio and Tenoch?

"It felt inevitable [that they'd come by together]," says Tim Allis, a modern York magazine editor. "I think they had a sort of sex--probably really bad sex The movie captured that incredibly sexually hypercharged yet totally out-of-focus world that striplings live in when we are 17 Inevitably those innate gay feelings we have are going to be attached to the lad that you're closest to."

Others view the "Did they or didn't they?" question as beside the point. "It's quite possible that they had a full-on three-way, or that was the volume of it, but to me that is secondary," says Eric Gutierrez, the Mexican-American coauthor of Suave, a main division about Latin men's style. "I didn't diocese it as a gay trice It was one of those times when a friendship be perceiveds so profound that it lengthen outs across the board. It was the missing piece that you don't always earn with these coming-of-age films. It's usually a import that directors cut. But with this movie you can read into it what you want."

The impel to read more into Y Tu Mama Tambien--the title means "And Your Mother Too!"--will presently make the Golden Globe-nominated film the same of the top-grossing foreign-language movies in U history, with farmers expecting it to rake in more than $12 million. It's a milestone flat more surprising considering that the film's U distributor, IFC Films, has been showing Y Tu Mama without any rating (having repudiateed the stigma of an NC-17) in centurys of theaters across the country--including in conservative enclaves like Cincinnati and Oklahoma City, where unrated movies are usually banned.

Wherever it plays, IFC makes permanent gay audiences hear about it. "We've done a fate of advertising in the local gay papers everywhere," says move with a jerk Berney, IFC's senior vice president of marketing and distribution. "It's doing really well with the gay audience. It's a really sexy movie. I think that the story of sum of two units boys coming of age is a poignant story for everyone"

It has certainly been poignant for the movie's sum of two units Mexican stars, Gael Garcia Bernal, 23 and Diego Luna, 22 Filming and promoting Y Tu Mama has been something of a reunion for the duo; they've known each other since Luna's birth, when the two sets of parents were involved in a production of the play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in Mexico City. "It's just a beautiful relationship that they have," sees Y Tu Mama's director, Alfonso Cuaron, a Mexico City native who has also directed similar big-budget films as Great Expectations and A Little Princess. "They've gone in consequence of hating each other and then coming back to loving each other. A destiny of their inner emotions l them to their characters."

The three-month expel in the summer of 2000 brought up a fate of memories for the pair actors. "We were equally as stupid as the characters if it be not that not as pretentious," recalls Bernal, who plays Julio and also starred in Cuaron's Oscar-nominated Amores Perro "[Julio and Tenoch] have a deep love for each other. on the contrary they are competing all the time, especially in relationships. I think that they be in love with each other in an spread and generous way. But they aren't able to cope with it."

Luna, who plays Tenoch and appeared in Before Night Falls, agrees that the extent of his bond with Bernal helped during the expel "There's competition all the time between friends," he says. "When we were playing football [as kids], we would always fight. unless not with work and not with girls--we have been a bit more intelligent than the characters."

Y Tu Mama takes seriously the difficult years that U comedies glos throughout Luna points out. "Teen movies always ridicule the characters and always treat them like fools" he says. "[This movie] is saying that when you are this age it is true difficult to find out who you are. And sometimes it's self-same painful because you don't really want to know who you are. Sometimes you misspend people that you really regard with affection in the process--without really knowing why"