During the first third of "Amores Perros," I was too busy sorting out what was happening on the screen to wonder if Mexico City has become so hell-like since I lived there exactly twenty years ago. There was more time to think about that during the second story. The expensive but badly built apartment seemed more familiar: the kind of shoddy construction that led to such a high death toll in the big earthquake. (I sublet--from an upper-class Mexican communist who was going to the Soviet Union for the summer--a badly constructed apartment in the cosmopolitan Zona Rosa that he used for occasional assignations.) During the last third, what was onscreen again absorbed my attention, and I gave up wondering how Mexico City may have metamorphosed over the last two decades to speculating about whether the disillusioned revolutionary turned contract killer, El Chivo (! chivo/ means a young goat ripe for roasting, or being a scapegoat. though the character we see is a very gruff old goat who is not going to be led meekly to any slaughter) is supposed to be looking like the elderly Karl Marx in a Diego Rivera mural or the God in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling creation of Adam. Eventually, I decided that he is playing God, and that his scapegoat days must have been much earlier. Also, remembering Luis Bruñuel's "Exterminating Angel" (1962) and, especially, "Los Olvidados" ("The Young and the Damned, "1950), I also decided that I should not infer too much about the current infernalness of Mexico City from this very jagged and not-a-little-exhilarating movie.

So much for my trip down memory's Avenida Insurgentes. "But what is the movie about?" This is a question not only for those who haven't seen it. There are three main stories connected by a car crash (which is shown early and often, from different perspectives). And unhappy characters in each of the three stories dote on their dogs. The two-word Spanish title is no help, because it can mean "Love for a cur," "love of dogs," or "doggish devotion." (The official English translation adds a copula, includes a word censored by epinions ,and has some whimsical connotations missing from the Spanish. This parenthesis is also as good a place as any to add that the English subtitles are considerably less gritty/insulting than the Spanish dialogue.)

Repulsemonkey suggested that the three stories are really the story of one unhappy love at three different stage. I have trouble seeing the middle third as being about the man who loves and loses/loved and lost. (Or I have trouble seeing the first and third as being about the beloved women characters. If only I could find a hook in the middle story to argue that the movie is "about" sibling rivalry...)

Rather than different stages of the same story, I see differing degrees of selfless devotion by the men of three different ages for women of roughly the same age (early 20s). In the first, Octavio (Gael García Bernal, whose eyes I heard characterized as "trippy" at the urinal after the long movie) wants to rescue the secretly pregnant Susana (Vanessa Bauche) from the mistreatment his brother Ramiro (Marco Pérez) inflicts on her and their baby. Octavio wants to give Susana a better life--one that includes running away to Ciudad Juarez with him. He enters the movie's alpha dog, Cofi, in fights to the death to raise the capital for his dream of placid family life with a store on Mexico's northern border. Only in a movie could that dream be realized, but not in this one!

In the second story, a magazine editor named Daniel( Álvaro Guerrero) leaves his wife and young daughters to live with a demanding supermodel Valeria (Goya Toledo). He stands by her when she is badly injured in the car crash. Her dog Richie falls through a hole in the posh apartment's hardwood floor and hangs out with the rats down there for what seems like a very long time (viewer time, that is). I think that Valeria is in part an homage to Bruñuel's "Tristana" and the central relationship seems in some ways to echo the one in "Red" (I thought that it was that I had seen "Red" again recently that made me make that connection, and was relieved to see the Susan Granger had already made it in her review. The woman who cares about the dog in "Red" Irène Jacob) is less shallow than Valeria--and unmaimed, but that's where I think the "Tristana" echo is.)

This middle part is more boring than it is a relief from the carnage surrounding it . It seems pretty much standard issue Euro-art-film portraying grand bourgeois selfishness, failed attempts at love , and terminal ennui. Nevertheless, it included two striking scenes of the disconnect between Daniel and his wife. In the first, they are in bed when the phone rings. Instead of turning the television volume down so he can hear whoever is phoning, she turns it up. He complains that he can't hear over the din and she shoots right back that she can't hear her program over the sound of his talking on the phone. The second is the antithesis of the first. Daniel, who has left his wife, calls her. Again, she recognizes who is on the phone, but he cannot find what to say to her about the mistake he has made and he hangs up having said nothing at all.

Yeah, this really is the same movie, and there is plenty of hopeless longing in the other two parts: Octavio's for Susana, and El Chivo's (Emilio Echevarría) for the daughter (Lourdes Echevarría) who thinks he's dead. She thinks that for the very good reason that, when he was going to prison, he told her mother to tell her he was dead. Reading a death notice of his ex-wife in the newspaper, he goes to the cemetery and sees his daughter. He then stalks her, keeping a distance greater than that he keeps from those he is hired to gun down. He amasses money, takes care of a number of dogs (including Cofi, whom he rescued from the crash site), and plays God, deciding when to take lives and when to engineer more creative solutions than a bullet in the back of the head. (There is also a memorably bleak funeral involving the surviving characters from the first story, and a connection between the deaths in the third story and the corpse.)

Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's film is dazzlingly edited (at least the first story is), as gritty as the Mexican parts of "Traffic" (similarly shot through a sepia filter and often very close-up). Both the violence and the multiple story lines recall "Pulp fiction" with less humor.

The very beginning of the movie is a disclaimer that no dogs were injured in making it. This is difficult to believe, but that the American distributor felt it necessary to include it reflects the extent to which Americans are concerned that pets not be hurt and unconcerned about violence to people.

Although I'm not sure what "trippy" eyes are, I do expect to see Gael García Bernal in more films (he's played Che Guevera in a miniseries that's in postproduction), along with his vicious brother here (Marco Pérez), and look forward to more films written and directed by Gonzales Inarritu, whose first film this seems to be after a career of directing television commercials, being a radio disk jockey, and composer.


Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age