What are things coming to in the United States?
First, Steven Soderbergh subtitles all the Spanish dialogue in Traffic. Then a
film in Mandarin becomes a huge box office hit and goes on to pick up several
Oscars. Now a two and a half hour long Mexican production is being shown not
just in art theaters but at a Mann theater here in San Diego. Hurrah, I say, not just because I am a partisan
of linguistic and cultural diversity, but because Amores Perros--colloquial
Spanish for "Love's a Bitch"--directed by Alejandro González
Iñárritu from an original screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga,
marks an important resurgence of the Mexican cinema.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Mexico, along with
Argentina, was one of the most important film producing countries in Latin
America, and Mexican films were widely shown in Spanish speaking communities in
the Southwest. In my childhood, at least three theaters regularly programmed
Spanish language releases, mainly produced in Mexico, here in San Diego.
Nevertheless, the significance of Mexican production was largely ignored in this
country.
Representative of a still prevailing
attitude is the entry on "Mexico" in Ephraim Katz's The Film
Encyclopedia. The article only mentions two directors--Emilio Fernández and Luis
Buñuel--that worked in the country during the "golden age" period from
the 1940s through the 1950s, and concludes with the comment that "few
significant films have emerged from Mexico since the early '50s, with the
notable exception of those of Spanish exile Luis Buñuel...." Yet revivals
of older Mexican films in Los Angeles, including a María Félix retrospective
last year, have shown how shortsighted such a judgment is.
A
legitimate complaint about many of the older films, however, is an emphasis on
the picturesque that tended to reinforce rather than to challenge Anglo
stereotypes about Mexican culture--a criticism that could be applied to such movies as
María
Candelaria (1944) and The Pearl (1947), both directed by the gifted Emilio
Fernández, or the later Macario
(1960) of Roberto Gavaldón. The exception here, of
course, would be the productions of Buñuel, many of which were set in Mexico
City and all of which strongly distanced themselves from any kind of folkloristic
lyricism, especially the great The Young and the
Damned (Los Olvidados, 1950).
Iñárritu's
directorial debut carries what might be called the anti-picturesque strain in
the work of Buñuel and Arturo Ripstein a good deal farther, taking place for the
most part in ravaged neighborhoods of Mexico City that most American tourists rarely see
and even less frequently want to know about. Although there are intriguing
structural affinities
between Amores Perros and certain films of Wong Kar-wai, Iñárritu's urban waste
land, which could almost serve as the setting for a dystopian projection of the
future, has little in common with the glittering, seductive Hong Kong
of Chunking Express or Fallen Angels. This is no fabled El Dorado, but like the
desert vistas of The Forsaken, a New World prematurely grown old.
In
contrast to the pathos-filled ending of Chaplin's Modern Times, in which Charlie
and the gamin (Paulette Godard) continue on down the endless highway always in
hope of finding a better life, the final shot of Amores Perros shows one of the main characters,
accompanied by his dog, walking into an enormous blackened plain that resembles
an oil sump or ground zero after a nuclear attack. The shot is just as devoid of
promise as it is of greenery, and it would difficult to imagine anything farther
removed from the reassuring, richly photographed shots which make up Emilio Fernández' paean to rural life in Mexico,
Pueblerina (1949).
The
movie emphatically underlines this vision of Mexico City as a metaphor for all
the socio-economic horrors visited upon Latin America by industrial capitalism
with its visual style, employing washed-out, grainy images and jerky, at times
almost spastic camera movements. While no knowledgeable viewer could ignore Iñárritu's indebtedness to
Buñuel and the nouvelle vague, in its willfully ragged
visual style Amores Perros--photographed by Rodrigo Prieto--often reminded me more of such early films of John
Cassavetes as Shadows, Faces, or Husbands.
Amores Perros begins with a terrible auto
accident in Mexico city as two young men flee from the cohorts of another man
whom one of the two has just knifed. In the back seat, a dog that the two have
been entering in brutal dogfights lies dying. Trying to escape the pursuers who
are shooting at them, the two run through an intersection and collide with a car
driven by a highly successful woman fashion model, Valeria (Goya Toledo). One of the pair dies while
the other, Octavio (Gael García Bernal), is seriously injured, and the model suffers a crushed leg which will
irreparably put an end to her career.
This
incident, which is repeated two times during the course of the film, shown from
different points of view, serves as a nodal point for the action of Amores
Perros, which consists of three interrelated sections dealing with the various
persons affected by the collision. The first section is flashback telling how
Octavio, who lives in a very poor area, becomes involved in dogfights as a means
of making quick money, in the hope of running off with his sister-in-law, Susana
(Vanessa Bauche), who is
constantly abused by Octavio's older brother, Ramiro (Marco Pérez).
This
section ends with the first repetition of the accident and continues forward
with the story of the model, who has just moved in with her lover, an older
married man that has left his wife and family. But already in the first section,
the movie has introduced another character, an old man who seems to be a bum and
who has been an onlooker when the accident occurs. With the completion of the
second episode, the action now shifts back to the moment of the crash and
focuses upon this individual, El Chivo (Emilio Echeverría), a former professor turned guerilla who
has served time in prison but now works as a hit man for a corrupt police
official.
It would be not only
precipitous
but puerile to begin talking about the death of linear narrative in this
context, yet I find it quite interesting to note that the two best motion
pictures I have seen so far this year, Memento and
Amores Perros, both make use
of a highly unconventional narrative technique. In the one case, however, that
of Memento, the device mainly functions as a way of livening up a more or less
traditional plot. The film's innovation is to take an otherwise linear narrative
and run it in reverse--a move that will only confuse viewers who fail to pick up
on the hints Memento adroitly furnishes from its opening shots.
Amores
Perros, on the other hand, although superficially less baffling, is much more of
a labyrinth, even if Iñárritu supplies two narrative vectors to help guide
the viewer through it: the dogs, who play a conspicuous role from the very
first; and El Chivo, who initially seems irrelevant to the action but figures
more prominently as the story progresses. But at every point in the movie, there
is a strong sense that the story could take off on an entirely new tangent,
could start with any single character and produce a new series of events which
would connect all the characters in a different way.
The
convention of using a great city as the microcosm of an entire society has its
roots in the nineteenth century novel, and in most cases this city was the
political and cultural center of the country like London in the novels of
Charles Dickens. But when such a symbolically charged setting was used as a
background, the action itself became the center of the center. What would
have seemed as much a chaos to a resident of London, Dublin, or Berlin as it
would have to a total outsider assumed a well-defined and meaningful shape to
the reader of a novel. Conversely, a novel--or later a motion
picture--could only achieve this effect by dramatically contracting the
material, by reducing its dimensions
But
not so Amores Perros, which aims at ramification rather than contraction, and in
this way opens up a totally different perspective on Mexico. Instead of
supplying two unities--the dramatic unity of the story and the supposed unity
of the nation--that stand in a symmetric relation to one another, the movie
juxtaposes two complex entities. Mexico City does not
just serve as a mirror for the rest of the country, but its complex spectacle
opens up onto the equally complex one that lies out side it. In
this way, Amores Perros blocks the reduction of Mexico to a neatly
packaged strereotype, a land of lazy peons and hot-blooded señoritas.
Amores
Perros has occasioned one of the strangest pieces
of writing on film I have ever encountered, an article that appeared in the
Sunday Calendar section (4/22/01) of the Los Angeles Times by the paper's lead
reviewer, Kenneth Turan, explaining why--and almost apologizing in the
process--he didn't like the movie. Although I was surprised by this
revelation, which I think Turan should have reserved for the silent, solitary
hours of an insomniac reverie, I was far more appalled by the uncontrolled
hyperbole of some of the critics who raved about Iñárritu's first film.
To
quote from Turan's article: "The New York Times' Elvis
Mitchell called it 'the first classic of the new decade with sequences that
will probably make their way into history'...To Time's Richard Schickel, 'Iñárritu's
debut is as fine as any in movie history,' while the Wall Street Journal's Joe
Morgenstern saw it as 'one of the great films of our time, or any
other.'"
I have no interest in
challenging the qualifications of these gentlemen, who have justly deserved
reputations for their abilities, but I think they are potentially harming
rather than helping the very cause they seek to further. How many certifiably
"great films" are there in the entire history of the cinema? Just
because so many bad movies get made now is no excuse for hailing any good film
that comes along as a "masterpiece". By
engaging in such a blatant orgy of hype, these critics are neither honoring
their profession nor are they doing any favor to a director who at this point
in his career needs recognition--not instant canonization.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
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