Amores Perros

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu made his directorial debut with 2000's AMORES PERROS.   Quite a first stab.  A big, impressive multi-character mosaic that mostly sustains a vice grip intensity for two and one half hours.  I saw the film some twenty years after its original release.  I feel it suffers due to my late to the party viewing, as by that time I had seen movies with overlapping character arcs like PULP FICTION, MAGNOLIA, SHORT CUTS, GO, and CRASH (not the Cronenberg picture).  Maybe this method wasn't quite as effective as it might've been years before, but I still found Inarritu's movie to be a strong, at times gut wrenching drama.

AMORES PERROS has three chapters, each titled with two characters' names.  We will meet all of the characters to varying degrees in each.  Linking them all is a car accident which involves Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his friend Jorge (Humberto Busto), who are fleeing guys with guns in a pick up truck.  The boys slam into a car. driven by Valeria (Goya Toledo), a fashion model whose image is seen on billboards around Mexico City.  A vagrant surrounded by dogs surveys the wreckage, from which another dog, severely bloodied, has been removed.  We learn the vagrant's name is El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), once a college professor who became a guerrilla fighter and abandoned his family.  Now he is a hit man.

I mentioned dogs.  They are pivotal in these stories. Octavio and Jorge discover the lucrative, unspeakably brutal dog fighting trade, and the former's rottweiler proves to be a continual victor. Octavio wants to use the money to run away with his brother's abused wife.  Then there's Valeria, now wheelchair bound and has a dog who chases a ball into a broken floorboard and does not come back up for several days, causing a rift in the already fragile relationship between her and her lover Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero), who has left his family to be with her.  El Chivo, who is spying on the daughter he gave up so long ago, brings the bloodied dog home to join his others, with tragic results.  Love indeed is a bitch, as the film's title translates.

Gullermo Arriaga's multi layered screenplay juggles the character calculus beautifully.  Sometimes ingeniously.  But this style felt less novel than before.  Maybe sapped some of the film's spark.  Nonetheless, Inarritu's entirely assured direction and the actors' commitment to the story was never less than involving.  There are scenes where the enormity of the emotions really got to me.  It's no exaggeration to state that this is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen.

The location shooting aids things immeasurably.  AMORES PERROS has an appropriately raw feel at every moment.  Interestingly, the second and third chapters could've easily become genre horror tales ala E.C. Comics with a few adjustments.

As you may already know, dogs suffer much violence in this movie, so those sensitive to such imagery are forewarned.  I consider myself part of that group, and had to tough my way through several scenes.