director/producer
Alejandro González Iñárritu
screenwriter
Guillermo
Arriaga Jordan
cinematographer
Rodrigo Prieto
music
Gustavo Santaolalla
editors
Carlos Bolado
Luis Carballar
Alejandro González Iñárritu
cast
Emilio Echevarría
(El Chivo)
Gael García Bernal (Octavio)
Goya Toledo (Valeria)
Álvaro Guerrero (Daniel)
Vanessa Bauche (Susana)
Jorge Salinas (Luis)
Marco Pérez (Ramiro)
Rodrigo Murray (Gustavo)
Dunia Saldívar (Susana's Mother)
Adriana Barraza (Octavio's Mother)
José Sefami (Leonardo)
Lourdes Echevarría (Maru)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 153m
mexican
release: June 16, 2000
u.s.
release: March 30,
2001
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other alejandro
gonzález iñárritu films
reviewed on this website:
- 21
grams
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It's early yet, but Amores
Perros may well turn out to be the movie of the decade. Too
bad it was released (in Mexico) only six months into the decade.
As layered and capable of surprise as Pulp
Fiction -- to which it has been compared because it,
too, consists of a trio of stories -- Alejandro González
Iñárritu's sinfully enjoyable epic roars in on
a wave of blood, gunshots and dog barks, pauses for a morosely
controlled study of upper-class discontent, then pulls it all
together in its final, steadily lacerating segment, which focuses
on the emotional violence of family. Actually, all three segments
do; the title Amores Perros works out as a pun in the
American translation -- "Love's a Bitch." It sure is.
The movie's big theme is what we'll do for love, even when love
won't do much for us.
González Iñárritu
could fairly be called a melodramatist: His stories revolve around
amped-up despair, with a central brutal accident altering the
lives of all its characters, and among the personalities on view
here are a homeless assassin, a fashion model, and an ambitious
kid who enlists his dog to compete in gory dogfights so that
he can earn money to provide for his pregnant girlfriend, who
also happens to be his brother's wife. If the words "soap
opera" have surfaced in your head at this point, you're
not wrong, and González Iñárritu is way
ahead of you. After all, the main problem with soaps is that
the storylines never really end; the characters go on for years,
often played by new actors when the previous ones leave to "pursue
other interests," and nobody ever stays dead. But take away
the assembly-line Monday-to-Fridayness of soaps and you do often
have the stuff of serious fiction -- even fantasy fiction, as
any Passions fan will tell you -- and Amores Perros
does for soap themes what Pulp Fiction did for
pulp themes.
In the first section, "Octavio
y Susana," we're deposited in the slums of Mexico City without
a map. This is a world where Susana (Vanessa Bauche) has to leave
her baby boy in the care of her unsmiling mother-in-law, who
grouses that she already raised her children and shouldn't have
to raise another; the only alternative is to leave the baby with
Susanna's own mother, who gets zonked on cheap wine while the
baby screams in another room. Susana's husband Ramiro (Marco
Pérez) works in a supermarket but brings home most of
his bacon from store robberies; he's the classic macho Latino
who would kill Susana if he found her with another man, but has
no problem throwing a quick bang to a comely co-worker. Ramiro's
brother Octavio (Gael García Bernal) also makes his money
illegally, though his method -- pitting his Rottweiler against
other dogs while hooting men bet on the outcome -- has more structure,
and is probably officially ignored by the authorities. Aside
from the fact that Ramiro is an abusive bastard and Octavio is
a gentler soul, you can tell the difference between the brothers
based on what they do after they've scored some cash. Ramiro
brings home a Walkman for Susana and wakes the baby to give him
his gift; Octavio simply hands Susana a wad of money, giving
her a choice as to what she does with it, and takes care to leave
the baby peacefully asleep.
Here and there in the first
chapter, we see glimpses of Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero),
a magazine editor visibly bored with his wife and distant from
his daughters, and Valeria (Goya Toledo), a model sparkling at
us from a giant billboard and from a TV talk show; we don't really
understand why until section two, "Daniel y Valeria,"
kicks in. These two, we come to learn, are an item: Daniel has
left his wife and bought an apartment -- a decent one, despite
the occasional hole in the floor -- for himself and the jubilant
Valeria. González Iñárritu shifts gears
radically: if the first segment was clouded over with the heat
and steam of desperation, this one is cool to the touch. When
Valeria is confined to a wheelchair, and her beloved doggie Richie
disappears into one of the holes in the floor (ah, dear reader,
after this sequence is over you won't care if you never hear
the name "Richie" again), Daniel begins to crack: he's
left his family, and for what? A hobbled model and a dog who
may have become a snack for rats? To his credit, González
Iñárritu takes this middle-upper-class anguish
seriously after the much more down-to-earth torment of "Octavio
y Susana." He's saying that no matter how rich or poor you
are, fate -- and love -- will fuck you up.
Love seems to be beyond the
grasp of El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría), the grizzled anti-hero
of the concluding segment, "El Chivo y Maru." But Maru
is not one of his many loyal dogs who follow him around the city
as he pushes his cart and sifts through the garbage; Maru is
his long-estranged daughter, who believes him to be dead. El
Chivo drifts through his existence, doing "jobs" (murders)
for a dirty cop; his latest assignment is to execute one yuppie
at the behest of another, though he has a Jules-like change of
heart when he discovers the relationship between target and targeter.
There's also a moment as fine as any in cinema when, after El
Chivo returns home to find some carnage one of his dogs has wreaked,
the black dog looks at him sadly and is thinking -- I swear he
is -- "It's my nature. Why hate me for it? You're no different."
From there, the story becomes about El Chivo's refutation of
the dog's silent accusation; he even shears off his gray mop
of hair and beard, and looks like such an entirely different
person that even a man he has taken captive does a double take.
Amores Perros runs just over two and a half hours,
and both times I've seen it the hours streaked by. There's a
brief stretch -- during El Chivo's tailing of his target throughout
the city -- where you may feel a slight tug of boredom; it feels
too conventional, and is probably only there so we can hear a
bit more Latino hip-hop mood music (the two-disc soundtrack album,
already hard to come by, is worth the effort of tracking it down).
Rodrigo Prieto's photography is unimpeachably drab and authentic
-- finding beauty in blandness and ugliness and the lurid clutter
of bedrooms -- save for one quick, apparently obligatory shot
of the sky at dusk: the image might have impressed in a lesser
movie, but in this one it stands out as banal. But Prieto also
gives us one of the great closing shots: El Chivo and his sad,
violent black dog leaving us for whatever the horizon offers.
I've left out a lot here --
including the nature of the aforementioned central accident and
exactly how it affects everyone -- only to keep Amores Perros
a virgin experience for the first-time viewer; ideally, you should
go into it knowing absolutely nothing except that the excruciatingly
convincing dogfight scenes were, indeed, skillfully faked. (And
perhaps you shouldn't even know that; for its American release
-- though not on the DVD -- the movie began with a disclaimer
that no dogs were harmed during filming, as if we'd assume that
those crazy Mexican filmmakers would destroy live dogs for realism.)
In that respect, Amores Perros is a lot like Pulp Fiction,
which also arrived garlanded with awards, critical hosannas,
and buzz about its violence (in both cases, the violence hype
was a bit overblown). But González Iñárritu
is a more thoughtful filmmaker than Quentin Tarantino, whose
best work slyly up-ends clichés and is deeply entertaining
for that reason; González Iñárritu takes
clichés and burrows around inside them, looking for the
grain of truth -- the connection to reality -- that created them
in the first place. As I say, it's early yet and I'll be happy
to be proven wrong, but I don't anticipate seeing another debut
film in the next eight years as richly textured, ambitious, deeply
felt, and downright satisfying as Amores Perros.
Alejandro González Iñárritu has thrown down
the challenge. Anyone care to top it?
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