Analysis of Amores Perros

'Amores Perros' Weaves A Brilliant Tapestry Of Love, Pain and Dogs

T he distributors of "Amores Perros " (literally "dog loves") have translated the idiomatic title breezily as "Love's a Bitch." This may sell tickets, which is all to the good, but it does casual violence to a drama of soaring ambition, thrilling power, steadfast moral purpose and, yes, shocking violence of its own. The film's Mexican director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, has suggested in recent interviews that a better translation would be "Tough Loves," or "Harsh Loves." The desperate lovers in three intersecting stories are linked to the lives of their dogs. Most of the humans, who suffer terribly, inflict suffering as well. The dogs serve both as companions, mirroring their owners' behavior, and as metaphors for the savagery of modern life. The film, set in Mexico City, starts with an assurance that no animals were hurt during production. Putting this disclaimer first was a good move, given what follows it, but I must also offer a claimer: "Amores Perros" is one of the great films of our time, or any other.

The three stories intersect literally, and devastatingly, with a car crash on a city street. A blond woman lies bleeding and screaming in one car. A couple of teenage boys are trapped in the twisted wreckage of the other. One witness to the carnage, a gray-bearded street person with a haunted face, goes to help the kids, spots an injured rottweiler in the back seat and decides instead to save the dog. From that moment on, the film moves back and forth in time, revealing and recapitulating -- and showing the accident from three points of view -- until the separate stories become borderless panels in one vast, tumultuous panorama of urban life. Like the muralist Diego Rivera before them, Mr. Inarritu and his screenwriter, the Mexican novelist Guillermo Arriaga, bring all the depth of conviction they need to the breadth of their vision.

As a central character, which he certainly is, the rottweiler, Cofi, gets to play in the film's most controversial scenes -- horrifying dog fights, with substantial purses, held in clandestine venues that include a drained swimming pool. For Cofi's young owner, Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal), the purses are an irresistible draw; Octavio dreams of taking the woman he loves, his sister-in-law Susana (Vanessa Bauche), far away from the city's squalor and the tyranny of her husband, and his brother, a petty crook named Ramiro. For some filmgoers, on the other paw, the fights will be hard to take, even though they're actually montages put together by artful editors -- the dogs were invisibly muzzled throughout. (One friend, an emergency-room physician, told me she wouldn't consider seeing the film. "I've got no problem with mangled bodies or pulling babies from bloody wombs," she said, "but I fall apart at the sight of a hurt dog.")

Gael Garcia Bernal as Octavio in 'Amores Perros'

Yet "Amores Perros," which opens Friday in New York -- national release begins next month -- should be seen by those who can see it, and not only for its dramatic correlation of canine combat and dog-eat-dog violence in human affairs. The writer and director combine the gravity, narrative sweep and emotional pull of traditional literature with the dazzling visuals and pungent music of contemporary entertainment. (Mr. Inarritu, a former disc jockey who specialized in talking a mile a minute, directed some 800 TV commercials before making this feature debut.)

The film leaps swiftly, seemingly effortlessly, from one level of Mexican society to another. If Octavio and his buddies have been struggling near the bottom, the blond woman, a supermodel known as Valeria (Goya Toledo), has been flourishing at the top. Her part of the triptych illustrates the precariousness of life for Mexico's rich along with its poor; the segment is a fable of romantic dreams destroyed by chance. I won't say more about Valeria, even though it's tempting to discuss the bizarre details of the plot, but I will tell you that her dog, a fancy little pooch named Richie, is far too eager to fetch, and that his fate is in the finest surreal spirit of another illustrious director who did great work in Mexico, the late Spanish genius Luis Bunuel.

Every one of the performances in this densely populated drama rings resoundingly true, but Emilio Echevarria, as the haunted street person, El Chivo (the goat), takes us far beyond naturalism into realms of Stygian fury and anguishing beauty. (El Chivo's soliloquy to his estranged daughter's answering machine is almost too painful to bear, though I wish a few traces of sentimentality had been cut from the text.) Once an idealistic revolutionary, then a terrorist, El Chivo has become a derelict hit man. Yet his story, the most remarkable of all, proves to be one of reconciliation and redemption, and the instrument of that change is the dog he rescued from the car crash, the innocently lethal rottweiler. "Amores Perros" has it all, brilliance and bite. The movie grabs you and won't let go.