AMORES PERROS
Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga (from his novel)
De Vargas NR 153 min subtitles
The movie opens with a high-speed car chase through the crowded streets of Mexico City. A wounded dog lies bleeding on the back seat of the pursued vehicle. The chase ends in a two-car collision that's horrific even by our jaded moviegoing standards. And from that deadly intersection we move back and forward in time, following three separate stories of dogs, love, and violence that occasionally brush up against each other.
Though the end credits assure us that no dogs were hurt in the making of this film, it will still test the sensibilities of animal lovers. At the very least, a few dogs must have been drugged, or else sent for extensive method training at the Canine Actor's Studio. The first story centers on a teenager who earns a nest egg to run away with his brother's young wife by entering his dog in dogfights, which he wins until an opponent spectacularly cheats. The grimy arenas awash in fur and blood are likely to be more upsetting to many audiences than the human violence, though there's plenty of the latter as well.
The second, and least effective, story concerns a supermodel and her married lover, and her fluffy little dog Richie who gets stuck beneath the polished floor of their new apartment when he dives through a hole in pursuit of a ball. The metaphors run a bit thick here, but what undercuts this section most is the unbelievability of the characters' responses.
The last part of the triptych features El Chivo, a man who was once a college professor with a wife and small daughter, then a revolutionary guerilla, then a convict. Now he's a homeless bum who makes a sporadic living as an assassin, living in filth and shattered illusions in an abandoned building with the pack of stray dogs he's taken in. He yearns for a reunion with the grown daughter who thinks he's dead, and he's a walking case study in the maxim that no good deed goes unpunished.
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who grew up in Mexico City, sees the love, loyalty, and brutality of dogs mirrored in the lives of the people who feed and care for them them. It's the first theatrical feature for Inarritu, but he handles it with a veteran's sureness. Comparisons are inevitable with Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, and also with Soderberg's Traffic; Inarritu lacks Tarantino's cocky comic swagger, but he leaves Soderberg in the dust. In part he benefits from the use of a cast of talented actors unknown here, who create their characters without the distraction of recognition. Best is Emilio Echeverria as El Chivo, the hirsute hit man, whose face rivets our attention whenever he rambles across the screen. If it were Michael Douglas in the role, no matter how good he was, a part of our consciousness would be distracted by his Michael Douglasness.
Inarritu set out to explore the social structure of Mexico City in this film, and he does it best when he stays in its sprawling underbelly, where it's a dog-eat-dog world. Amores Perros was Mexico's entry in the Oscars, and it's a terrific movie - if you can stomach the (simulated) dogfights.
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