The soundtrack drops away before the narrator speaks in Y tu mamá también. Alfonso Cuarón has explained that he and his brother Carlos wrote that interruption into the screenplay. In a car full of boasts, the sudden quiet makes room for facts the boys cannot fit into their story about themselves. The narrator is not a friendly guide to a summer vacation. He is the film’s second route through Mexico, one that crosses the first without asking permission.
Julio and Tenoch invite Luisa on a trip toward a beach whose promise is larger than their plan. They imagine themselves as equals because they share a car, jokes, and a code of loyalty. Their class positions travel with them. Their competition for Luisa turns that code into a set of rules that each can break while pretending the other is the problem. Luisa, facing news the boys do not understand, has reasons of her own for joining them. The trip is never only their education.
Cuarón’s film appeared in 2001 after he had worked in Hollywood. He later told Cannes that making it helped him rediscover his country. At a BAFTA screenwriters’ lecture, he described the older-woman road-trip premise as initially too thin. The writing became interesting to him and Carlos when the characters’ class and social setting entered the design. That account matters because it resists the lazy idea that Mexico is colorful scenery added to a universal coming-of-age story. The country is part of what the boys have learned to ignore.
The narration exposes that habit. It can follow a roadside person or place beyond the instant when Julio and Tenoch stop paying attention. It tells us that their freedom to keep moving is not the same as everyone else’s. The device also denies them final authority over what their journey means. Their language can be funny and intimate, but it is too small for the social world through which they drive.
The film’s title is a taunt, and much of its energy comes from young men trying to win a contest neither understands. The silence before the narrator turns that energy against itself. It asks the audience to hear the country at precisely the moment when the boys would fill the air with another boast. Cuarón does not make them stand for all of Mexico. He gives them a route through it, then keeps revealing what lies just beyond their account.