Sometimes there's a clear reason for dividing
a film into distinctive chapters, each following the distinctive but
overlapping stories of unrelated people.Here, it feels like the structure has
been used largely because no one storyline was long enough to stand alone as a
feature film.
When Octavio (García Bernal) discovers
that his dog Cofi can kill all-comers in dogfights, he seizes on this to make
the money he needs to run away with his brother's wife. At one fight, a rival
owner shoots Cofi. On the way to the vet, Octavio jumps a red light.
Next, we follow TV producer Daniel
(Álvaro Guerrero), who leaves his family to move in with supermodel, Valeria
(Goya Toledo) the other driver involved in the crash. Her leg is crushed and
her contracts cancelled. With nothing else to do, she becomes obsessed with
trying to find her little dog, Richi, after he disappears through a hole in the
floorboards.
Back at the scene of the crash, a tramp
cum killer-for-hire and dog-lover (Emilio Echevarría) finds Cofi. He takes him
to his squat and nurses him back to health. This relationship helps him come to
terms with his revolutionary past and return to society.
With colourful characterisation, fresh
and natural performances from a mostly untried cast, and a soundtrack which
betrays González Iñárritu's deejaying past, there's a
lot to recommend this.
But ultimately, the structure
lacks purpose, the film struggles to justify its two-and-a-half-hour running
time and the faint-hearted might find it a little gory.
The Guardian Film Review
Every dog has his day
Savage animals, assassins, a killer script
and a majestic vision - this Mexican movie is a revelation from start to finish
For once the comparisons don't
matter. Amores Perros may (as 23 festival juries around the world have hinted
already) owe something to Tarantino, Altman and Buñuel. It may, more precisely,
sometimes feel like a Mexican Magnolia. But it is also a unique finished
article, one to see and never forget.
1.
Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch)
2.
Production
year: 1999
3.
Country: Rest of the world
4.
Cert
(UK): 18
5.
Runtime: 153 mins
6.
Directors: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
7.
Cast: Emilio Echevarria, Gael Garcia Bernal, Gael
Garcia Berrai, Goya Toledo
Two cars crash sickeningly at a
traffic light in Mexico City, three stories begin. All are about amores and
perros, loves and dogs, here translated as 'Love's a Bitch'. The man at the
wheel of the first car is young Octavio (Gael García Bernal) who loves the wife
of his thuggish brother and dreams of taking her far away from the flyblown
apartment of family survival. He needs money, though; he has a fighting dog
which savages all challengers and wins him wads of it. But now another thug has
shot that dog - Cofi lies bleeding on the car's back seat - and Octavio has
stabbed the gunman in return. He is pursued. He flees heedlessly.
The woman at the wheel of the
second car is Valeria (Goya Toledo), the long-limbed blonde model on the
perfume hoardings up above. Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero) publishes magazines - and
he's just left his wife to set up home with this cover girl.He had hit the
celebrity jackpot; now Valeria lies maimed and battered in hospital; and soon,
crawling painfully around the flat after her wretched little pooch, Richi, she
will become a permanent cripple buried by regret. And what about the wounded
killer dog on Octavio's back seat? A whiskery tramp with a barrow and a pack of
hounds rescues and heals him. When he was young, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría)
ran a communist terror gang: today, out of prison at last, he hires himself as
a paid assassin and dreams of the daughter he left behind when she was two, now
a handsome girl who doesn't know he exists. The killer Cofi and the man killer
himself somehow blend. El Chivo finds a kind of peace.
No synopsis, though, does
justice to the range and novelist's depth Guillermo Arriaga brings to his
screenplay. These people are real and vivid; when they bleed, we bleed with
them. Their lives are a potent mix of longing and disaster. Every one of the
five protagonists is defined by his or her relationship to the dogs scampering
through this teeming city of strays and rats. Man and his best friend become
interchangeable symbols, reflections of differing passions. We are all animals,
delving into our animal nature as the wheel of fortune turns. We all, in
extremity, have to define who we are.
Does 153 minutes of that sound
daunting? It isn't. Alejandro González Iñárritu's direction has a constant,
driving edge. He is telling an enthralling story with controlled passion. He
cares and we care. Rodrigo Prieto's camerawork, by turns, can be claustrophobic
or visceral or - at the close - lyrical about this great bowl of a place with
20 million people beating at its lid. The performances, too, are a revelation.
Echevarría stalks hypnotically, menacingly through every scene until, crying
alone on his unknown daughter's bed, he breaks into tears. García Bernal's
trusting love for his brother's wife - the dark-eyed Vanessa Bauche - hovers
agonisingly between hope and despair. Higher up the social ladder, Toledo and
Guerrero become sad victims as the love, the pampered physical beauty, which
binds them is hacked away on the surgeon's table. Toledo, leg amputated, face
ravaged by agony, looks out at the poster site which once bore her golden image
and her shoulders hunch. Mortality comes to everyone. Mortality sucks.
González Iñárritu says that he
wanted 'to find the perfect catharsis or the uncomfortable shame of the viewers
watching themselves' - and 'to exorcise my own terrible fear of the ordinary
human experience of day-to-day existence.' He believes that love is hope - 'the
circle is never closed; pain is also a path towards hope.' No standard
director's guff. It is just how you feel as you stagger into the light. Amores
Perros is a first, amazing work from a director who vaults at a stride into the
big league, taking the future of Mexican cinema with him. It is shocking -
especially as dog rips apart dog - and absorbing: but it is also majestic in
ambition and accomplishment. Not the brutal sheen of Tarantino or the quirky
social commentary of Altman; not the surreal imagination of Buñuel. This one
stands alone. Go. Just go.
New York Times Film Review
Amores Perros (2000)
FILM FESTIVAL
REVIEW; From Mexico, 3 Stories And an Array of Lives United by a Car Wreck
By ELVIS
MITCHELL
Published:
October 5, 2000
When a director shifts gears as
often as does Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the man behind the emotionally rich
debut film ''Amores Perros,'' you may wonder if he knows what he wants. He
does, and this film is satisfying in many ways.
He is unashamed to immerse this
tough-minded, episodic film noir in freshets of melodrama. Significantly, he
knows the minute difference between being unashamed and being shameless, and
because he knows how to keep things hopping -- working from an intricate script
by Guillermo Arrianga that has a novelistic texture -- we watch a man with
immaculate control of the medium.
The picture begins with a car chase
through the streets of a Mexican city; there's a bleeding dog in the back seat,
which certainly sounds shameless. Like everything else in ''Amores,'' a film in
which nothing is what it seems, this is the kind of genre touch that Mr.
Gonzalez Inarritu expands into something far more haunting.
The velocity of this first scene --
in which Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal, an actor with a wonderfully expressive
face) drives his wounded dog to a veterinarian while fleeing revenge-crazed
gunmen -- may seem like something out of a silent film. But it still has a
literal and emotional impact that knocks the breath of you. This may be one of
the first art films to come out of Mexico since Bunuel worked there, and
''Amores'' has traces of Bunuel's romantic absurdism.
The setup of the stories -- and the
fact that a car wreck is at the center of the picture, an accident that changes
of the lives of all of the principal characters -- will inspire comparisons to
''Pulp Fiction.'' While ''Amores'' is often playful, it is certainly not glib;
it's full of the heartbreak found in corridas, featuring an almost mythological
suffering that owes much to the traditions of Mexico, with characters trapped
in the undertow of Fate.
Many of the narrative details feel
like loving gestures from a storyteller proud of the weight of folklore and of
his story. The violence is fast and shocking: a shooting in a restaurant ends
with blood dribbling onto a hot griddle, an image that could be a metaphor for
the overheated emotions of the film.
Each of the film's three stories
catches its characters at different times in their lives: the beginning, the
middle and the end. In the first ''Octavio and Susana,'' Octavio is in love
with his thug-of-a-brother's wife, Susana (Vanessa Bauche). We're introduced to
Susana as she walks distractedly down the street wearing a backpack and a
schoolgirl's uniform. She rushes into the house and picks up her crying infant
son, complaining to her mother-in-law that she has a math final to study for.
Octavio stares longingly at her, and he's right: she is too good for his
brother. But they're all kids scrambling for each other's attention.
''Amores Perros,'' though it has an
earthier meaning, could be translated as ''Love's a Dog,'' and dogs play a big
part in the story. Octavio ends up putting his dog, Cofi, on the dogfighting
circuit after Cofi is attacked by a fighter's pit bull and triumphs. The
unremitting brutality of the dogfights, in which the animals slam into each
other and the sickening thud of their bodies is amplified, is something that
has to be noted.
The sight of the dogs' bodies after
the fights, fur matted with blood, sprawled on the concrete, will send a chill
through even the most distanced viewers. (The canine carcasses look
astonishingly real, though a tag at the end assures us that no animals were
harmed in the making of the picture.) Dog lovers may be put off entirely by the
fights.
A dog is an important element of
''Daniel and Valeria,'' the story of a new relationship that curdles as it
plays out. The middle-aged Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero) has left his wife and
daughter and moved into a love nest with Valeria (Goya Toledo), who can best be
described as a spokesmodel; a towering billboard shot of her perfume ad can
seen across the street from their new place.
Like all the stories this one teases
us with a trick opening, before moving into a vignette that almost feels like
an urban legend. Valeria's Lhasa apso dives into a hole in the floor, and we
can hear the trapped dog scurrying back and forth and imagine the vermin
feasting on its body. Valeria is in a wheelchair -- her car was struck by
Octavio's, leaving her with a horribly damaged leg -- and her inability to move
and her wounded vanity change her behavior.
''Amores'' feels like the first
classic of the new decade, with sequences that will probably make their way
into history. The picture has the crowded humidity of a telenovela, but Mr.
Gonzalez Inarritu doesn't linger over the soap-operaish aspects. They're part
of the fabric, an emotional tug that sends the characters to places they don't
belong, though they know better.
As the last section, ''El Chivo and
Maru,'' unfolds, a devoted revolutionary turned street rat and assassin (the
incredible Emilio Echevarria), who lives with his pack of dogs, seems to learn
a lesson about not submitting to one's impulses. An unforgettable mark-of-Cain
subplot, in more ways than one, arrives out of nowhere to deepen the hurt.
It's rare that a
director can enter films with this much verve and emotional understanding. Mr.
Gonzalez Inarritu loves actors, and his cast brings so many different levels of
feeling to the picture that the epic length goes by quickly. ''Amores Perros''
vaults onto the screen, intoxicated by the power of filmmaking -- speeded-up
movement and tricked-up cuts that convey a shallow mastery of craft -- but
evolving into a grown-up love of narrative. In his very first film Mr. Gonzalez
Inarritu makes the kind of journey some directors don't, or can't, travel in an
entire career. AMORES PERROS
Directed and produced by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu; written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) by Guillermo Arriaga; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Mr. Gonzalez Inarritu, Luis Carballar and Fernando Perez Unda; music by Gustavo Santaolalla; production designer, Brigitte Broch; released by Lions Gate Films. Running time: 153 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight and Sunday at 9 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall as part of the 38th New York Film Festival.
WITH: Vanessa Bauche (Susana), Gael Garcia Bernal (Octavio), Umberto Busto (Jorge), Emilio Echevarria (El Chivo), Alvaro Guerrero (Daniel), Rodrigo Murray (Gustavo), Marco Perez (Romero), Jorge Salinas (Luis Miranda Solares) and Goya Toledo (Valeria
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