Amores perros (2000)

reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten


AMORES PERROS (Love's a Bitch)

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Lions Gate Films Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Writer: Guillermo Arriaga Jordan Cast: Emilio Echevarria, Gael Garcia Bernal, Goya Toledo, Alvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche, Jorge Salins

The great Scottish poet Robert Burns once said "The best laid plans o'mice and men/Aft gang a-glee." And don't we all now that! In Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's debut film "Amores Perros"--which joins "Crouching Tiger," "Divided We Fall," "Everybody Famous," and "The Taste of Others" in the Oscar competition for Best Foreign Language Film--scripter Guillermo Arriaga Jordan reminds us of an even more all- embracing quote. "If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans." Everybody in "Amores Perros" has A Big Plan. Everybody gets shafted. But ah, there's some justice in the failure of the humanity's plans in this case: each of the aspirants violates one or more of the Ten Commandments and each receives justice of biblical proportions.

What's so great about Mexico's entry to the Oscar competition aside from its grandiose ambition to illustrate a divinely-inspired vengeance on its principals? Aside from the skillful acting of a cast largely unknown to a typical American audience, "Amores Perros" keeps us on the edge of our seats by its graphic but essential violence, the intensity of its characters' drives, and not least by a battery of dogs of all descriptions who are, sad to say, uncredited in the press notes. Dogs figure in virtually every sequence of this three- part, "Traffic"-like story but this is no "Lassie Come Home" nor are we about to see Toto in Kansas. In fact we are in the world's most populous and perhaps most polluted metropolis, Mexico City, which--judging by the way U.S. tourists seem to be bypassing that capital in favor of Cancun, Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta--is a dangerous place to be.

One of Mexico's most notable performers, Emilio Echevarria, figures in each of the three stories in the role of El Chivo, but the real center of the action is not a goat but a ferocious dog named Cofi. In the first of three sequences, Cofi is entered into a dog-fight competition, illegal in Mexico though practiced in shady places by seedy characters for fairly large stakes. Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal), an man of about eighteen years of age, is in love with his sister-in-law Susana (Vanessa Bauche), and is in need of some pesos to carry out his plan to free her from her occasionally abusive husband and elope with her to Juarez. Entering his Rottweiler into the ring, he succeeds in cashing in fifteen straight times, but remember what the Bible says about incest: his plans go awry when he perpetrates a godawful car crash.

The second story deals with a middle-aged, middle-class magazine publisher, Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero), who abandons his wife to live with a smashing supermodel, Valeria (Goya Toledo). The car crash--this time shown through the perspective of the model rather than of the perpetrator of the collision--interrupts the plans of this box-office couple. Perhaps inspired by Bunuel's film "Tristana," director Gonzalez Inarritu casts not one but two divine reprisals on the unfortunate beauty who in one situation desperately tries to save her little dog who has fallen through the apartment's floorboards and is threatened by large rats. (By contrasting the glossy wooden floor with the unkempt life beneath, Gonzalez Inarritu is obviously throwing us a metaphor for surface glitter vs. inner rot.)

The final episode finds El Chivo, now a homeless man with a cartload of homeless pooches, wandering through the mean streets of Mexico City. Once a revolutionary who had abandoned his family only to wind up spending twenty years in jail for murder, he now earns money as a hit man who, having realized an epiphany after witnessing the car crash, manipulates both his customer and his customer's intended victim to act out a story of sublime justice.

"Amores Perros" faces tough competition particularly against "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (which Joel Siegel pretentiously called "one of the finest films ever made), but for its more earthy treatment of celestially-inspired repayment for our sins deserves serious consideration by the Academy.

Not Rated. Running time: 153 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com


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