Teenagers Tenoch and Julio have a farewell sex with their two girlfriends before the girls depart at the airport for an Italian vacation. The two guys are from wealthy families, and are bored or smoke marijuana. At a party, they meet Luisa, a woman in her 30s, who starts a conversation with them. After her boyfriend Jano makes a phone call and admits he cheated on her, an angry Luisa calls Tenoch and Julio and offers herself to travel with them on their planned trip to a beach with a car, and they happily accept. They stop at motels, talk, while Luisa has sex first with Tenoch, and then with Julio. They get lost, but eventually find the beach and make friends with local fishermen. Tenoch and Julio drive back home, while Luisa stays at the beach. A year later, Tenoch tells Julio that Julia died from cancer.
The director Alfonso Cuaron returned from Hollywood back to his homeland Mexico and achieved a huge critical and commercial success with the independent erotic road movie "Y tu mama tambien". Although undoubtedly a quality achievement, the movie is not for everyone's taste, and neither is it that particularly inspired. Luisa (excellent and underrated actress Maribel Verdu) is a great character, but Tenoch and Julio are kind of annoying. Especially weak is the opening act where a lot of scenes just seem random, arbitrary or banal, such as the moment where Tenoch and Julio are driving in a car until one of them farts inside, or when they masturbate lying on two springboards, until their sperms fall into the water of the swimming pool—would two straight guys really masturbate in front of each other, regardless how good of friends they are? Through the directing treatment the story reaches a higher level: there is almost no music, long takes sometimes last up to 8 minutes, whereas the most refreshing addition is the metafilm idea of a narrator who randomly gives summaries of what's going to happen to totally random supporting characters who appear in just one sequence.
For instance, the narrator explains that a traffic jam was caused by bricklayer Marcelino who was hit by a bus; that a fisherman will in the future find a new job as a janitor in a hotel and will never fish again; or the especially ironic episode when Tenoch and Julio chase away pigs from their tent at the beach, and the narrator goes: "The 23 pigs had escaped from a nearby ranch. Over the next few months, 14 would be slaughtered. Three of those would cause an outbreak of trichinosis among attendees at a festival in the village of El Chavarin." Cuaron also gives a lot of colorful little episodes that depict the mentality and customs of Mexico, and give the movie a three-dimensional look, such as when the car stops randomly because a white-blue ribbon is "blocking" the road since some random people ask for donations to their little daughter, a "queen", or when Luisa in the car asks Tenoch and Julio about how they "turn on" their girlfriends, somewhere 48 minutes into the film, while a police truck randomly stops right to them and police officers start arresting random people standing there. The sex scenes are rather sparse: Luisa has sex with Tenoch, and then with Julio, but both already come after 10 seconds, which is underwhelming, whereas their final "threesome" in the end feels rather inconsistent and random. The best moments are thus humorous ones (in the opening act, mom sends Julio to help Cecilia find her passport, but as he goes to her room, Cecilia persuades him to have a "quickie" with her on the bed, saying: "I want to take a little of you with me!" But when she hears the footsteps of her mom approaching, she quickly shoves Julio out of the bed on the ground, pulls her pants up, and he emerges with her passport: "I found it!"), contemplating about growing up and embracing to live to the fullest, regardless of what other people will say, but the cancer death at the end feels shoehorned, as if it tries to force sympathy out of the viewers instead of believing in itself without such gimmicks.
Grade:++
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