Summary
Tenoch and Julio lie on adjacent diving boards at the country club masturbating. They yell back and forth different women to inspire their fantasies, at one point invoking the thought of Salma Hayek. Then, Julio thinks about Luisa, Tenoch's cousin's wife, and immediately has an orgasm.
We see Luisa in bed at home, starting to doze off, when suddenly her phone rings. It's Jano, who is crying and seems upset. When she asks him what's wrong, he tells her that he is very drunk and she tells him to call her tomorrow. "I'll be back in two days. I love you so much," he says, weeping, before telling her that he slept with another woman. "I'm telling you, I'm a piece of shit," he says, sobbing. She begins to cry and abruptly hangs up, overcome with weeping.
The next day a maid brings a plate of food to Tenoch, as the phone rings. When the maid answers, it's Luisa, telling him she's glad she caught him before he went off to "Heaven's Mouth," the beach he told her about. "Is the invitation still open?" she asks, and he says they will pick her up that afternoon. Immediately after, Tenoch calls Julio at home and tells him that they have to go to Heaven's Mouth. When Julio laughs at his friend, reminding him that they made up Heaven's Mouth, Tenoch tells him that they have to bring Luisa there.
Tenoch tells Julio that they have to use his car, but Julio insists, "It won't make it, the radiator and the battery are fucked." It's their only option, however, as Tenoch tells him that his father took his car away. The narrator tells us, "Julio Zapata lived with his mother and sister. He had not seen his father since he was five. His mother was a secretary in a global corporation, where she had been working her whole life. His sister Manuela, a.k.a. "Boinas" was a political science major at the National University of Mexico and a left-wing activist."
We see Tenoch and Julio walking through a crowded protest to find Manuela, so that Julio can ask to borrow the car for 5 days. The scene shifts and Tenoch pushes Julio standing in a shopping cart down an aisle of the grocery store, where they pick up beer for their trip. They throw bags of chips around and make mischief. After, they visit their friend Saba, who goes through the map and shows them what routes to take on their road trip to get to a beach. At one point, Saba is so high that he mistakes a river for a road, laughing at his error.
Luisa smokes at home, when suddenly Tenoch and Julio buzz. She grabs a bag and goes down to meet them. On the road, Julio asks Luisa what she does, guessing sociologist, then philosopher, psychologist, Victoria's Secret model. Finally she tells them she's a dental technician, even though that wasn't her dream. When they ask why she became a dental technician, she says that she lived with her sick aunt when she was 16 and had to find work quickly. "I never did really well in school," she tells them, "All I ever wanted to do was travel and see the world."
As they drive, they pass a car with newlyweds in it and the narrator chimes in: "Luisa was never comfortable at Jano's dinners with his artist and intellectual friends. There was always someone, whether with good intentions or not, who would press Luisa for an opinion during their debates. Her reply was always humble, 'I don't know about those things.' She often thought about challenging the guests, to see if anyone could name every tooth in the right order. She never dared."
At one point in the drive, Julio asks Tenoch to pass the chips, calling him "Charolastra," his nickname for his friend. When Luisa asks what the name means, they tell her that it means something like "astral cowboy," and that their friend Saba came up with it while tripping on mushrooms. They tell Luisa about their friends: Saba is becoming a bore because he's so into drugs, Daniel came out of the closet and is into different things now, and Pecas has bad boyfriends and wouldn't sign their Manifesto. "You have a Manifesto?" Luisa asks, and the boys tell her that it's top secret.
They recite the principles of the Manifesto: There is no greater honor than being a Charolasta, do whatever you feel like, pop beats poetry, get high at least once a day, you shall not screw a fellow Charolasta's girlfriend, whoever supports America FC is a faggot, screw morality, never marry a virgin, and truth is never attainable.
The narrator tells us that the three of them tell stories that bond them on their trip. "Their stories, although adorned by personal mythologies, were true," he says. The narrator goes through all the facts that are omitted from the stories: "It was never mentioned how Julio lit matches to hide the smell after he used Tenoch's bathroom, or that Tenoch used his foot to lift the toilet seat at Julio's house."
The group arrives in a town and Luisa asks if the boys have girlfriends. They tell her that their girlfriends are traveling around Italy as they all sit down for a meal. "Why do you think girls go to Italy?" Luisa says, and when the two friends guess some possibilities, she informs them that it's for the hot men. Tenoch and Julio are angry at this suggestion and Tenoch insists that since he took Ana's virginity, she would never cheat.
Luisa asks if they cheat and they tell her they don't, and when they ask her the same question, she tells them she's never cheated. Tenoch asks her more about how she met Jano, and she tells him they met at a bar in Madrid. "I bet he was wasted," Tenoch says, but Luisa insists that she was the one who was wasted. She tells them that she and Jano had very similar family histories which connected them, and that Jano was the only one there for her during a difficult time. The camera moves over to the kitchen and we see a group of women eating and preparing food.
That night, Luisa goes to her room and the boys to another. Julio lights up a spliff as Tenoch wonders if their girlfriends are sleeping with Italians. Julio asks Tenoch if he thinks Luisa wants to have sex and they guess that Jano has been cheating on her. Suddenly, Tenoch goes outside and Julio follows. They go to Luisa's window and peek in, seeing that she is sobbing.
The next morning, Luisa knocks on the boys' door to wake them up. Both Julio and Tenoch are still sleeping and Luisa insists that they have to get going if they want to make it to the beach.
In the car, the boys pass Luisa a spliff and she takes a few hits, liking the taste. As Julio and Luisa talk, Tenoch looks out the window and notices they are passing through Tepelmeme, the birthplace of his nanny. The narrator tells us, "He called her 'mommy' until he was four years old." Suddenly, Luisa tells the boys that she knows they spied on her the previous night, and teases them about the fact that they wanted to see her naked.
When Luisa asks them if they've ever had sex with any girls other than their girlfriends, Tenoch teases Julio for saying that he has, insisting that he has only slept with his girlfriend. Julio then makes fun of Tenoch for only sleeping with whores, as they run into a large event blocking the street and give some money as a donation to the villagers gathered there, who are celebrating a local beauty queen.
Analysis
The film is frank about sexuality and is as much a portrait of sexual exploration and development as it is a straightforward coming-of-age film. Julio and Tenoch, excitable teenage boys, are preoccupied with sex in a typically adolescent way, and Cuaron depicts their shared horniness with candor and straightforwardness. The effect of this is at once shocking and innocent, as only the frankness of teenage sexuality could be. Cuaron shoots the friends from multiple angles as they masturbate on the diving boards, and when Julio comes thinking about Tenoch's cousin, we see his semen as it hits the water of the pool.
After Jano, Luisa's husband, cheats on her, she is heartbroken and at a loss for how to heal from it. Unexpectedly, she calls Tenoch to ask him if she can still come with him and Julio to Heaven's Mouth. Little does she know, but Heaven's Mouth does not even exist, and the boys are not planning a trip. Tenoch plays along, however, and says that they will pick her up that afternoon.
The two friends, Julio and Tenoch, are contrasting figures in several ways. While Tenoch is exorbitantly wealthy, as his father is a politician, Julio comes from a middle-class family. Cuaron displays this contrast through juxtapositions; one minute, we see Tenoch's maid walking through his gigantic, luxurious house to bring him a meal while he lounges on the couch and the next we see Julio in his family's apartment, a quainter place filled with sentimental objects and family photos. Additionally, the boys have very different family structures: while Tenoch has an overbearing father with high expectations and strong preferences for how he should live his life, Julio has not seen his father since he was five and has been raised by his mother and sister.
Cuaron's camera work serves to illuminate the story and align us with the characters. When Luisa leaves her apartment to go on the impulsive road trip with the two young men, the camera pulls back slowly to show its emptiness as she leaves. It then wanders backwards, then towards the open window, looking downward to show her meeting up with the boys. The movement of the camera aligns us with Luisa's apprehension about her reckless decision, and sets up the road trip as a momentous adventure.
The omniscient narrator has the effect of illuminating intriguing details about the characters while also ensuring that the story never becomes sentimental or idealized. Without the narrator, the viewer might see the events of the film as somehow charmed and outside of reality. The narrator ensures that we see the characters as people, with secrets and unspoken facets, even if bonds between them might feel strong. Thus, the viewer is put in a privileged position, let in on details that the characters do not even know about each other. For instance, the moment when the narrator tells us about the different ways that Tenoch and Julio use the bathroom at one another's houses marks a moment in which we learn something the characters do not. Their bathroom habits are not consequential details, but they let us in on minute details that the two friends would never share with one another. The same goes for the moment in which Tenoch is struck by the thought of his self-sacrificing nanny, while passing through her hometown in the car.
