Summary
The film begins with Tenoch Iturbide having sex with his girlfriend, Ana. Immediately after they climax, he says, "Promise me you're not going to fuck any Italians," to which she responds, "How could I?" He goes through a list of other potential sexual partners from different countries she could have sex with, and makes her promise not to sleep with them. "What about you?" she says, and he promises her. On the count of three, they promise each other they will not sleep with anyone else.
In voiceover, an unknown narrator tells us that "Ana's mother, a French divorcee, taught at the Learning Institute for Foreigners." We are told that Ana's mother does not mind Ana sleeping with Tenoch, as the scene shifts to Tenoch's friend, Julio, who must hide his lovemaking from the parents of his girlfriend, Cecilia. The narrator tells us, "Cecilia's father, a pediatrician specializing in allergies, feared his daughter's relationship with Julio had gone too far," and we see Julio sitting on Cecilia's couch as her father reads the paper. The narrator continues telling us about Cecilia's parents, saying, "Her mother, a Lacanian psychologist, saw it differently. She believed their relationship was innocent."
Cecilia's mother comes down the stairs complaining that Cecilia lost her passport, and Cecilia calls down to Julio for help. He rushes upstairs to find her in her bedroom, and the young couple hastily have sex—the missing passport was a ruse all along. She asks him if he will be going out that night, but he insists that he's going to miss her too much. Cecilia throws Julio off her onto the ground just as her mother opens the door asking if she's found her passport.
At the airport, Tenoch and Julio greet each other as their girlfriends prepare to leave. Ana's father, a journalist-turned-politician, comes and greets the boys, as the narrator tells us, "He worked for the government in Mexico City as Manager of Logistics in the Department of Culture. Although he liked Tenoch, he referred to him as 'The Preppie,' when he was with his colleagues. Never in front of his daughter, though."
As they drive away from the airport, Tenoch tells Julio that his father is pressuring him to study economics, but that he wants to become a writer and study literature instead. As they hit traffic, Julio guesses there is another political demonstration taking place, and that his sister is probably part of it.
The narrator tells us, "On that day, three demonstrations took place across the city. Nevertheless, the traffic jam was actually caused by an accident. Marcelino Escutia, a bricklayer from Michoacan...had been hit by a speeding bus. He never used the pedestrian bridge, because its poor location would force him to walk an extra mile to his work site."
The narrator gives us some background on the friends: Tenoch was the middle child in his family, the son of a Harvard-educated economist and Secretary of State and a housewife who "attended various spiritual seminars." As the boys roll a joint in Tenoch's large house, the narrator tells us that Tenoch's name is Aztec, inspired by his father's sudden nationalism.
We see Julio and Tenoch with one of their friends talking about drinking and getting stoned. Tenoch brags that when some girls who are coming over get there, he is going to have sex with her. They go to the balcony to smoke the joint, when Tenoch's mother calls to them from the yard. She mistakes their stoned affect for despair at the loss of their girlfriends and tries to comfort them with some spiritual mumbo jumbo. She asks Julio if he's coming to Jessica's wedding and reminds him he has to dress up, as the president is coming also.
The scene shifts to the party the boys throw, where Julio and Tenoch drink, smoke marijuana, and take ecstasy from San Francisco. The narrator tells us that they fail to seduce the girls they want to, and "worried this failure would be the blueprint for the rest of the summer." At 4AM, Julio vomits in the street, and Tenoch smashes his headlight at 5AM on his way home.
The scene shifts to the boys at a country club where Tenoch's father is a "majority shareholder," enjoying its facilities on a Monday when it is otherwise closed. The boys jump in the pool and swim from one end to the other. Later, as they shower in the locker rooms, Tenoch gives Julio swimming pointers and teases him that he has an "ugly dick." Julio jokes with him, challenging his friend to give him oral sex.
Later, at the wedding, the friends observe how many bodyguards Tenoch's dad and the president have. Tenoch's father comes over and takes Tenoch's drink and tells him to go talk to some family friends. Julio goes to the bar and commiserates with the bartender, "What a bunch of assholes, huh?" and orders a rum and Coke. Suddenly, he notices a beautiful woman walk past the bar.
Tenoch talks with his cousin Jano, a writer, who asks him if he's actually serious about wanting to write books. The narrator tells us more about Jano: his father died when he was young and that "he escaped [his mother's] excessive attention by going abroad for a degree." Jano lectures Tenoch about writing, as Julio comes over to talk to his friend. Suddenly, while tying his shoe, Julio accidentally bumps into Jano, causing him to spill his drink.
Tenoch's father makes a toast at the wedding, praising the president for his presence there. Meanwhile, Tenoch and Julio find the beautiful woman that Julio saw and awkwardly introduce themselves. They ask if she's bored and where she's from, and she tells them she's from Madrid, and that she's an in-law on the bride's side, just as Jano, who turns out to be her husband, comes and shoos the boys away.
The narrator tells us more about the woman: "Luisa Cortes lost her parents in a car accident when she was ten. She was brought up by her great-aunt, a Franquista spinster who became sick and Luisa had to take care of her for the last five years of her life. Luisa lived with her until she was 20, when she married Jano. Months later, her aunt died, so she was left with no family."
As Jano hands Luisa his drink and goes to find another suit in which to meet the President, Tenoch and Julio call to her, and Tenoch tells her that Jano is his cousin. She recognizes him from when he was a child, and accepts a cigarette from him. When Tenoch asks her more about her plans, she tells him that Jano is going to a symposium in Villahermosa, but that she's staying in town to have some job interviews. When she mentions that she'd like to go to the beach, Julio tells her that they are planning to go to the beach, "a beach that only the local fishermen know about." When they invite her to come along, she asks if she would have a place to sleep and they assure her she would. She declines, saying sarcastically, "Jano would love that idea."
The narrator tells us, "The next morning [the president] would express his outrage at the Cerro Verde massacre. And deny that the State Governor was involved in the tragedy. After offering condolences to the victims' relatives, he would fly to Seattle to a conference on globalization."
After Jano leaves on his trip, Luisa goes to the doctor to get some test results. In the waiting room, she takes a magazine quiz called "Are You A Fully Satisfied Woman?" The narrator tells us about several of her answers: that she prefers being awake to sleeping, that she values time more highly than money or power, that she thinks more about the present than the past or the future. He then tells us, "The magazine defined her as a woman who is afraid to claim her freedom. Luisa did not agree."
Analysis
The movie begins with a frank depiction of sex between two young people in love. Tenoch and Ana, his girlfriend, have passionate and loving sex in her bed, before promising one another they will be faithful to one another. Director Alfonso Cuaron does not shy away from depicting their erotic union, showing their intimacy in full bloom, without cutaways or obscured details. In this way, the film shows that its approach to sex will be curious, straightforward, and unabashed, much like a teenager's approach to sex. The tone of the film immediately takes on the perspective of its young and bright-eyed protagonists.
These protagonists are Julio and Tenoch, who are best friends, and have parallel experiences, each bedding their respective girlfriends before the girls leave on a trip to Italy. While Tenoch is from an upper-class political family, Julio comes from a leftist, middle-class background. Their backgrounds distinguish them in subtle ways, but they are joined at the hip, drawn to one another in shared boyish earnestness.
Another notable element of the film is the voice of an omniscient narrator. He chimes in starting early on in the film to give us background details about the characters and about the political context in which the events are occurring, but his identity is unknown. Perhaps he is an older version of one of them, or perhaps he is the author of the fiction, but Cuaron does not reveal his identity, instead asking us to trust the voice with the authority of narrative. It is through his eyes that we are led to view the events, an older person's perspective on youthful shenanigans. The sound of the action cuts out as he speaks, and we are pulled into a suspension, a footnote for the proceedings.
The adult political world serves as a backdrop to the two friends' youthful follies. Julio comes from a leftist family and notes that his sister often participates in demonstrations. Meanwhile, Tenoch comes from a highly educated and upper-class family, and his father is the Secretary of State. The boys horseplay, fart, and smoke weed as any normal teenage boy might, but in the background is the din of political conflict and inequality. While the cause of the traffic when they drive home from the airport is not due to a demonstration, it is shrouded in a dark political reality, as a working-class bricklayer who was trying to shorten his commute has been hit by a bus. The body of the dead bricklayer on the side of the road is especially sobering in contrast to the bourgeois concerns of Tenoch and Julio, and the contrast highlights the multifariousness of existence, the competing political realities at play in the everyday.
At the wedding, Julio and Tenoch encounter a beautiful woman, Luisa, who happens to be married to one of Tenoch's more obnoxious cousins, Jano. Their interest in Luisa at first is purely sexual, as they admire her rear from afar, but when they talk to her, they find that they are intrigued by her personality. While she cannot immediately accept their invitation to the beach, she is intrigued by their youthful exuberance, and they seem to offer some energy and spark to her predictable existence as the overlooked wife of a writer. The narrator does not tell us outright that she is dissatisfied, but as we follow her journey apart from the boys we get a glimpse into her life and the loneliness that she combats.
