Y Tu Mama Tambien Alfonso Cuaron's 2001 film Y Tu Mama Tambien shares a number of superficial similarities with Gus Van Sant's 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. Both films focus on an intense friendship between two young men, structuring itself around dual protagonists -- Julio Zapata (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna) in Cuaron's film, Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) and Mike Waters (River Phoenix) in Van Sant's. Both films are essentially a road movie, and both complicate the young men's relationship with a third central character who comes between the two. What is most interesting in comparing the two films is the way in which they handle differently two central themes: homosexuality, and social class.

The depiction of social class by Cuaron is realistic, and told with exquisite novelistic detail: the most memorable example is the revelation (by voiceover) that when Julio uses the bathroom at Tenoch's family house, he is careful to light a match afterward, and when Tenoch uses the bathroom at Julio's family apartment, he lifts the toilet-seat...

The social behavior of the two boys indicates assumptions of a stigma based on class: Julio is ashamed that he would somehow smell worse in the lavish home of Tenoch's wealthy family, while Tenoch is repulsed that the lower-middle-class apartment of Julio's mother might be crawling with poverty germs. But it is important to note that the socio-economic gap between the two boys is not so broad as to make their friendship implausible. Nonetheless, a strong class symbolism is built into the names of the characters: Julio's surname is Zapata, which he shares with the Mexican leader of peasant revolution (portrayed by Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's 1952 film Viva Zapata!). Tenoch's surname Iturbide is shared with a general from the Mexican War for Independence who briefly reigned as Emperor of Mexico. Bernal's character is the namesake of a revolutionary champion of peasants, while Luna's is the namesake of a self-styled emperor. The symbolism of the surnames is -- for anyone with a knowledge of Mexican history -- a little heavy-handed. Social class…