Life is like the surf.

''Truth is cool but unattainable... the truth is totally amazing, but you can't ever reach it.''

In Mexico, two teenage boys and an attractive older woman embark on a road trip and learn a thing or two about life, friendship, sex, and each other.

Maribel Verdu: Luisa

A Mexican rite of passage story framed as a road movie, Y tu mama tambien is funny, rude and eventually quite touching. The road in question leads to an imagined beach named Heaven's Mouth, the spontaneously created fantasy of two horny sex mad seventeen year-olds, Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna). Cheekily flirting with Luisa, a 28 year-old from Madrid, the lads unwisely invite her to join them on an unplanned trip to their mythical beach, not for one moment expecting her to say 'yes'. She does, after having her own personal problems.

The motivations of the hormonally-charged Julio and Tenoch are not hard to fathom. They want to get laid, and Luisa duly obliges by seducing each of them in turn. But the seductions prove to be a catalyst for some painful self-discovery as the young men come to realize that they know rather less about women, about each other, and about themselves, than they presume they do. Luisa's motivations remain enigmatic, until a dramatic revelation at the film's climax.

''Who cares who you two fucked when you come that fast!''

Writer-director Alfonso Cuaron is here heavily indebted to Francois Truffaut, whose Jules et Jim this movie strongly resembles in two particular ways. It's not simply in the time-honoured theme of two close male friends besotted by the same alluring and slightly mysterious woman. It's also in the use of the distancing device of a narrator who serves to provide a degree of hindsight to an extremely up-close-and-personal story, locating it in a wider social context. In this latter regard, where Truffaut used newsreel footage, Cuaron cleverly incorporates fleeting glimpses of events taking place along the road as the journey unfolds: fatalities, drug busts, folk festivals. These brief sightings reveal almost subliminally an alternative Mexico of political corruption and economic poverty, but also of the endurance of the human spirit.

It's a world that the over-privileged but under-nurtured Julio and Tenoch have scarcely begun to connect with. Cuaron's knack for displaying social injustice is as acute as his ear for raucous teenage banter and it gives his film a resonance beyond the reach of the average teen comedy. There's a raw, improvised feel to the script that is entirely successful in conveying the fluctuating moods and energy levels of its testosterone-fueled protagonists. Bernal and Luna fling themselves into their roles with engaging enthusiasm and humour. Verdu is pleasingly understated in a role that seems a little under-developed. Perhaps deliberately, Cuaron never allows us to get too close to the heroine.

Y tu mama tambien is an entertaining and perceptive snapshot of a very distinct moment in its characters' lives. Julio and Tenoch are captured on the verge of adulthood, and Luisa on the threshold of a mental and physical journey concluding.

''Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea.''

8/10