Y tu mamá también Review

The trick that makes Cuarón's film more than a very funny sex comedy is the narrator. Twice or three times a reel the sound drops out entirely and a flat male voice tells you something the characters will never learn: that the bricklayer whose crossing they just sped past was killed there, that the fishermen at the beach will lose their living to a hotel, that a checkpoint they joke their way through is not a joke for everyone else on the road. Emmanuel Lubezki's camera behaves the same way. It follows Julio and Tenoch for a while, then wanders off them to watch something at the roadside and comes back when it feels like it.

Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are so at ease together that the class gap between them takes half the film to register: Tenoch's father is a government man with a house staff, Julio's sister is off at a protest. Maribel Verdú has the hardest job and the best performance, playing a woman who agrees to the trip for a reason the boys are too busy to ask about, and who runs the last act because she has decided to. The screenplay, which Cuarón wrote with his brother Carlos, was nominated for an Oscar and won at Venice.

It was released in the United States without a rating rather than take the NC-17, and a decade of American distributors used it as the example of why that system is broken. What lasts is the final scene in the cafe, two minutes of small talk that quietly closes off everything the road trip pretended to open.