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Dogs, love and car crashes in Alejandro González Iñárritu's debut feature Amores Perros |
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Emilio Echevarría (El Chivo), Gael García Bernal
(Octavio), Goya Toledo (Valeria), Álvaro Guerrero (Daniel), Vanessa Bauche
(Susana), Jorge Salinas (Luis), Adriana Barraza (Octavio’s mother), Marco Pérez
(Ramiro)
What links playboy kid Octavio (Gael García Bernal), model
Valeria (Goya Toledo) whose career is so high it can only go downhill, and El
Chivo (Emilio Echevarría) a hitman who lives like a scruffy hobo? Love of
course! Well that and a near-fatal car accident that has life-changing effects
for all three of them. And dogs too. They all love dogs. Iñárritu’s debut film
plays like a mixture of Altman and Tarantino, throwing together three
small-scale stories into something that feels electric and fast, but also
strangely empty, as if it is skirting the surface of its characters without
really delving into them.
Its interesting re-watching this film now, after Iñárritu
has become a double Oscar winner and one of the world’s leading directors. The
mastery of technique is all there in Amores
Perros. Iñárritu’s style with the camera is fluid, intense and engrossing,
and he uses a wide combination of fast-cut editing tricks, stylish camera work
and handheld cameras that immerses the audience in the seedy underworld of
Mexico City. As part of a wave of Latin American films made at the time, Amores Perros perhaps comes second only
to City of God as an example of how
to bring the danger and reality of the streets to the screen. Shot with a
drained out style that makes everything feel even more grim, dirty and
depressing than it probably is, Amores
Perros is as sharp a dog bite of cinema as you could expect.
Within this brilliant evocation of urban cinema work, Iñárritu
crafts a series of three morality tales so universal in their structure and
themes that they could just as easily been pulled from Chaucer or Boccaccio. It
works as well, these three short films linked by common themes, cleverly
structured narratively so that we learn more about each story as the other two
unfold. Iñárritu structures the pivot of the story being the car crash that
opens the film. The causes leading up to it are covered in the first story,
with the events of the second story hinging on its effect on model Valeria in
the other car, and the third spinning out the change of lifestyle it helps push
on hitman El Chivo. Each story starts at different places in relation to others
and each expands and deepens the overall picture we get of Mexico.
And it’s a place with its own underworld economy, powered by
everything from murder and robbery to dog fighting. Octavio is a low-rent
criminal (as is his brother) who ends up sucked into pitching his vicious
Rottweiler into dog fighting. El Chivo lives in filth and dirt and takes
commissions from corrupt cops to knock off targets. Both these stories hinge on
inequality and desperation: Octavio and his family are working-class and have
remarkably little. El Chivo is literally a tramp, a man who has turned his back
on his old affluent life in disgust. The people they deal with are hoodlums and
criminals and the few middle-class people who intrude into their lives do so
with contempt. It’s all particularly obvious when, in the middle chapter, we
head into the world of model Valeria and her lover, magazine editor Daniel –
although even they are struggling to make ends meet.
It’s this middle story that actually makes for a fascinating
centre point in the story. Valeria is crippled in the car accident, bed-ridden
and disabled in the very week that Daniel has finally left his wife and children
to be with her. Daniel (well played with a growing frustration and
disappointment by Álvaro Guerrero) increasingly finds it hard to keep his
patience with the disappointed and increasingly despairing Valeria (affecting
work by Goya Toledo). This story of romantic, illicit love turned far too
quickly into a burdensome marriage filled with dependencies has a universal
tragedy to it. Their problems hinge around the disappearance of Valeria’s
beloved dog, which may or may not be trapped under the damaged floorboards of
the flat, a despair that becomes an obsession for Valeria and a constant burden
for Daniel.
Valeria’s love for a dog becomes a substitute for the
disappointing, passion-free relationship that she and Daniel find themselves
locked into (Daniel even takes to calling his ex-wife to hear her voice). Dogs
are more of a tool to Octavio. His vicious Rottweiler is his route to the money
he needs to get his brother’s wife to elope with him. Gael Garcia Bernal plays
Octavio with the edgy, simmering energy that powered so many Latin American
films of the era, his face a mixture of surly resentment and romantic ambition.
Octavio’s passionate flings with his sister-in-law have a youthful immaturity
to them, that even she seems to recognise (his brother, while a somewhat absent
husband, is clearly someone she relates to far more than the sexy Octavio).
Discovering his dog’s capability for violence, he moves into the underworld of
dog fighting, opening himself up to a world of trouble.
This use of dogs as a tool for greed and ambition perhaps
reflects Octavio’s lack of emotional maturity and understanding of the impact
of building a future with his sister-in-law, no matter how much he may wish to
run away. For hitman El Chivo surprisingly, dogs are instead surrogate loves
and emotional partners who have replaced the family (and indeed his regard for
people in general) that he gave up long ago. Played with an expert anger
masking deep sadness and self-loathing by Emilio Echevarría, El Chivo loves his
dogs with all the intensity and care that is lacking from his relationship with
humans. It’s this that gives El Chivo the self-regard that allows him to begin
to change and rebuild his life.
Iñárritu’s primal film handles these universal themes of
love and despair with intelligence and energy, even if it’s essentially three
tales that play out more or less as you might expect. Because this film is
essentially a collection of age-old morality tales, handsomely mounted but
fundamentally predictable. What might you really learn about human nature from
this film? I’m not sure. Because this is a pretty standard, even narratively
safe drama, for all the minor tricks it plays with timelines. I’m not joking
when I say this would not look out of place in The Canterbury Tales – and the moral issues it presents are lacking
in shades of grey. Adulterers are punished, cheaters do not prosper, the “bad”
are generally punished and for all that one of our characters is a hitman, he’s
repeatedly shown to have more depth and hinterland than most of the rest of the
characters in there.
It’s an interesting reflection on Iñárritu. He is without a
doubt a major director of cinema, whose skills with the camera and editing are
flawless. He creates here a film that is absolutely striking in its vibrancy
and cinematic technique and its immediacy. But is it also a film that is a
little too much about the mechanics of the stories rather than really invested
in the stories themselves? I think it might be. Iñárritu is a master showman,
but not necessarily a great storyteller and I think Amores Perros is a great example of that.
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