By then, I was a fourteen-year-old burgeoning cinephile with a Tumblr page full of like-minded and equally hormonal teenage girls. I was sold on the film by that community, who embraced and championed its erotic focus on two beautiful young men Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal in a love triangle with a married woman in her late twenties, played by Maribel Verdu. I pursued it on a Friday night trip to the local video store with my parents, feeling shifty with what felt like secret contraband under the banner of a foreign title.
The story tells of a seemingly inseparable friendship between two Mexico City teenagers, the working-class Julio Bernal and the well-off Tenoch Luna. When the pair meet Luisa Verdu , a married Spanish woman, and invite her on a road trip to the beach, she initially refuses. After receiving some bad news, however, she changes her mind on a whim and joins the two horny year-olds in a rusty old car with a beach cooler thrown in the back.
As they travel, they chat about life, love, and of course, sex. Luisa slowly teaches the two callow boys what it means to have good sex, with some great verbal exchanges on the subject. Still, my prurient expectations were met. With its wide blue swimming pools and naked men, its homoerotic impulses and dirty talk, and that first scene where Luisa abruptly orders Tenoch to drop his towel, those were the moments I remembered best when I sat down for a revisit.
The interwoven stories lend a sense of impending doom to the otherwise lighthearted road tripβseize the summertime excitement while it lasts because the joys it brings are short-lived.
When Tenoch and Julioβwhose threesome with Luisa led to a kiss between themβmeet again after a long period of alienation, their palpable awkwardness overwrites any former intimacy. The narrator informs us that they will never see each other again, leaving the audience to decide what to make of that information. To me, it suggests that the young men are destined to run away from any happiness they shared.
