Oh Diego..

Bored teenagers Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) meets Luisa (Maribel Verdu) at a wedding. The boys try to impress the woman of their knowledge of a secret beach they know called Heaven’s Mouth. After a confession of infidelity from her lover Jano, a distraught Luisa calls Tenoch and bids to join their fictitious trip to Boca del Cielo.

The boys scramble with their preparations, and guided with a map and directions from their perpetually wasted friend Saba, they pick Luisa up. The journey is fraught with revelations and emotionally charged sexual encounters between Luisa and each boy. Yes, she does them both, so to speak.

Luisa calls Jano telling him where she had gone, while the boys themselves deal with their friendship issues. Apparently both of them slept with each other’s girlfriends- several times. At some point during the journey Luisa threatens to abandon the trip because of fights between Julio and Tenoch.

Seeing their prey walk away, the boys kiss and make up. Luisa makes them agree that from then on she’ll call the shots and there will be no more fighting between the two; she hops back in and the trip resumes again. A desperate Julio, worried that Luisa would soon find out that the secret beach was a hoax, swerves into a dirt road just as his friend had told him.

The car gets stuck in the sand, and the three spend the night. Luisa wakes up the next morning, and found that they were indeed at a beach. A family from a nearby island invites them on a tour around the islands for a fee, and the three agreed. In the distance, Luisa sees a white sand island with emerald waters, and asks the man what the name was. Lo and behold, it was indeed Boca del Cielo.

In her last phone call to Jano, Luisa breaks up with him. The three spend the night toasting over Tequila, all the screwed up things in their lives. This, of course, ends with a threesome, with a heated kiss between Julio and Tenoch. Boy, they really do know what the viewers want.

The morning after, the boys decide to go home, while Luisa stayed to explore the local coves. After the trip neither Julio nor Tenoch mentions to their families anything about the trip. They stop seeing each other.

Months pass, and one day they run into each other and decide to have coffee. After catching up on each other’s lives (Tenoch got accepted at the university to study Economics, while Julio plans to study Biology at the community college), Tenoch tells Julio about Luisa. She had died of cancer a month after their trip. The boys bid goodbye, and they never saw each other again after that.

The movie Y Tu Mama Tambien is about the beauty and recklessness of youth- the days of inexperience, experimenting, and excitement. Of course, I hope Tenoch and Julio grew up into men eventually, but the trip certainly captures that wild abandon that the young are prone too. Luisa, in a way, had helped turn them into men- at least sexually. She tells them to do it “slowly and with finesse” (this tip she gave, after episodes of pre-ejaculation from both boys). The last thing she said to them was: “Life is like the surf, so give yourself up like the sea.”

The one thing I learned in this movie is to do it slowly- real slow, and with finesse. (Wink,wink.)