Summary
Further down the road, Luisa tells the boys the story of losing her virginity, with her first boyfriend at a factory. She smiles as she tells them she didn't expect it and that "it hurt so badly, I thought I'd never do it again," but they did it many more times. "He really fell in love with me," she tells the boys, adding that she would skip school to ride with him on his motorbike, and that they planned to go to the Cote d'Azur in France together, but that he was killed in an accident when he was 17.
The narrator tells us that had the group driven down the road they are now driving on 10 years earlier, they would have encountered a horrible truck accident.
They drive through an economically depressed village, past hovels and defunct businesses, and past a group of cops pulling over another car. Eventually, they find themselves in the middle of a large herd of cows and Julio honks the horn at them, waking up Luisa and Tenoch, who have been sleeping. Luisa notices that Tenoch has an erection and comments on it, which prompts the two friends to argue about who has a nicer penis.
"How do you make love to your girlfriends?" Luisa asks the boys, and they describe their erotic tactics. She seems unsatisfied with their answers and they try more and more to impress her with their accounts of their sexual tactics. "You ever sneakily wiggle your finger up the ass?" Luisa says, just as the car breaks down.
In a small village, a mechanic tells them that the car will be ready the next day. Julio compliments a man's cowboy hat and the man gives it to him to wear. Luisa looks at a shrine nearby and notices a stuffed bear wearing a shirt that says "Luisa." She smiles at the very old woman sitting beside the shrine and tells her that the bear has her name.
As the boys look at a poster that says "Italia" depicting the statue of the David, giggling about the size of the statue's penis, Luisa leaves a message on Jano's phone, telling him that she wanted to disappear from his life, but she realizes that was wrong. "I met a woman named Martina. She's 98 and she remembers everything, ever since she was five," she says, before rattling off a list of things Jano should do when he returns home, wishing him well without her.
The group settles at a small motel with a pool filled with dead leaves. As Julio showers, he asks Tenoch to get him some shampoo. In her room, Luisa cries about leaving Jano and Tenoch wanders in to ask her something in nothing but a towel. He apologizes and goes to leave, but she tells him to stay. When he asks to borrow some shampoo, she instructs him to take off the towel, which he does reluctantly. She analyzes his penis and invites him to masturbate in front of her. He hesitates and she begins to take off her clothes, inviting him to come over. He walks towards the bed and she performs oral sex on him, before inviting him to perform oral sex on her. He hastily goes to do so, but she has to instruct him to take off her underwear. He then makes love to her, ejaculating very quickly. The camera pans over to the door, where Julio is watching.
Julio wanders down to the leaf-covered pool as the narrator tells us, "Julio couldn't understand what he was feeling. It wasn't rage. The only time he had felt this pain in his stomach was when he was eight, when he woke up thirsty one night, and on his way to the kitchen, found his mother in his godfather's arms in the living room. Julio walked away quietly and never mentioned the incident to anyone."
After a moment, Tenoch comes down to the pool and asks Julio if he wants to have a swimming race. They jump in and swim laps, Julio in the lead. When they emerge from the water, Julio yells at his friend, "You let me win, asshole." He then tells Tenoch that he had sex with Ana, his girlfriend. The narrator chimes in again: "Tenoch had only felt this pain in his stomach when he was 11, when he saw a photo of his father on the front page of a newspaper. The article linked him to the illegal import and sale of contaminated corn to the poor. Tenoch and his family moved to Vancouver for 8 months. He never questioned this."
That night the trio eats, and Luisa perceives a tension, even though she has no idea about Julio's having slept with Ana. The narrator tells us, "[Luisa] assumed that her transgression had disrupted a natural balance that only she could restore." When they say goodnight and go to their rooms that night, Julio questions why Tenoch isn't going to Luisa's room. Tenoch is still angry and smokes a cigarette in the dark, asking Julio how many times he had sex with Ana. Julio tells him it was just once, when Tenoch was away, at a party. Tenoch asks for more specifics, like what underwear Ana was wearing at the time, whether they had oral sex, and whether she came. Julio insists that he felt bad about it, but Tenoch is very angry, yelling, "You fucked my trust, you fucked my girl, asshole! You fucked me!" The narrator tells us that the friends fought all night.
Analysis
Y Tu Mamá También unfolds less as a plot than as a portrait of relationships and connection in unusual circumstances. The narrative momentum of the film comes from the unusual intimacies formed by the three traveling companions, and the plot arc feels like a road trip itself, ambling and meandering as it goes along. Luisa, who had seemed so formal and removed at the wedding where she met the friends, is now relaxed and unguarded, passing a spliff and sharing intimate stories as the trio becomes better acquainted.
Part of what makes the film so charming and captivating is the fact that even in the idealized scenario of an impromptu road trip, the up-and-down inconsistencies of life remain. The film is both bombastic and heightened as well as true to life. One minute, a character is gleefully laughing or making a lewd joke, and the next they are faced with a sobering reality. This happens many times throughout, such as when the boys go to spy on Luisa and find her sobbing in her room, or when she tells them the story of her lost virginity before telling them that the man who deflowered her died in a motorcycle accident. These juxtapositions, between joyful and solemn, feel true to reality in a way that is not always common in film.
This juxtaposition also has a great deal to do with the characters' age difference. While Julio and Tenoch are impetuous young men, on the brink of experiencing adult realities, yet still protected by youth and supervision, Luisa is an adult woman, whose life has taken turns that she could never have expected. Her relationship to her own hardship is straightforward and mature, while the boys are caught off guard by some of the more adult things she tells them. Thus, a transmission takes place between two generations: Julio and Tenoch allow Luisa to "let her hair down" and enjoy a youthful good time, and she in turn teaches them something of the adult world that is waiting for them.
Matters get more complicated when Luisa initiates sex with Tenoch. Sorrowful from her breakup with Jano, Luisa wipes her tears quickly and instructs her young companion to take off his towel and masturbate for her. The encounter soon becomes intercourse, and Tenoch ends up ejaculating within a minute, while Julio watches from the door. The camera pans slowly from the humiliated Tenoch and amused Luisa over to the open door, where Julio stands watching. The movement of the camera underscores the sense of surprise and shock that Julio feels at seeing his friend sleep with their attractive companion.
While the relationship between Julio and Tenoch has been somewhat renegade and rule-less up until now, their sexual indiscretions open up some big feelings of betrayal between the friends. Julio feels betrayed by the fact that Tenoch has sex with Luisa, and reveals to him in turn that he had sex with Tenoch's girlfriend Ana. At this news, Tenoch is furious, yelling at Julio and trying to get every detail out of him that he can, and insisting that Julio has ruined the friendship. Just as the road trip opens up spaces of intimacy and connection between the traveling companions, it also opens up wounds and rifts between them.
