Amores Perros



Shari L. Rosenblum

If dog days are, as the ancients believed, those hottest days ruled over by the Dog Star, Sirius - it would follow that Dog Loves might be those hottest loves ruled over by their own dog stars, as each of the canine subplots in Amores Perros (literally Dog Loves, or Tough Love) seems to suggest. And if (as it is in English) a dog's life is a life of misery - it would follow that Dog Loves might well be miserable loves, as the film painfully depicts. But Dog Loves is not the translation we are given for Amores Perros, the popular and much overrated Mexican contender for this year's foreign language Oscar. Instead, we get the cutesy "Love's a Bitch."

This is the first clue that the film will be less incisive than one might hope. But even without its inappropriate title translation, Amores Perros would have much less bite than bark.

Still, and despite its having received glowing accolades from all the expected quarters, this first feature from director Alejandro González Iñárritu does have something to recommend it: an air of blood-stained naturalism and grainy misery, broken souls and broken bodies carefully limned and likened to each other, and everything mirrored and mocked in some imagined canine counterpart. But all these efforts to bring us down to the dirt beneath the grit and grime of the dog's life men lead day in and day out are dulled and blunted by the director's inability to let the film speak for itself. An unbearably heightened authorial self-consciousness and the heavy-handed bible-thump of metaphoric moralizing muzzle what might otherwise have been truly cutting edge.

Amores Perros opens with a car chase, a bloodied dog, and a crash. We are then taken sequentially, and not, through three interspliced, if not truly interwoven, stories and at least twice as many angles of brutality, cruelty, resentment, coldness and other underbelly strains we tend to idealize in love. As love. Trapped there, circling the literal mark of our morbid curiosity - the wreck on the road - we slow down to watch what we swear we do not want to see, and from this vantage point surprise three strata of society at the intersection of their lives, both physical and philosophical.

In the first segment, the film flashes back to what brought the racing car with the wounded Rottweiler to the crash at the crossroads. The camera takes us to a young woman still in schoolgirl clothes rushing home to find her baby being neglected by her alcoholic mother. The woman is Susana (Vanessa Buche), and she, along with the Rottweiler, Cofi, is at the symbolic center of the segment called "Octavio and Susana," a triangle of love and violence. Octavio (Gael García Bernal) is the brother of Ramiro (Marco Pérez), a smalltime punk/hood. Susana is Ramiro's abused wife; Cofi, his dog. Octavio covets them both. When one day Cofi, in Octavio's care, attacks and kills a pit bull champion of the underground dogfights in Mexico City, Octavio devises a plan: to enter Cofi in these canine-gladiator competitions and use the money won to run away with the again-pregnant Susana. Susana's somewhat less easy to persuade than Cofi, however, and tragedy follows each of their paths.

Both religious instruction and self-important cinematic commentary on Mexico City's underclass dulls the intended jolt of this first plot and its resolution. The animal fights are clearly intended as echoes and reflections of the human interactions, with body slams and animal shrieks of pain, corpses matted with blood and guts - and the impossibility of victory even in victory. (There is a note at the film's beginning that no animals were harmed in the making of this film; it is unclear how they got the realistic looking corpses). Still, for all its attempted re-invigoration of neo-realism, and the shock of those fights, the story is more trite than moving. Predictable and fundamentally lacking in narrative imagination, its overriding effect is an offensive didacticism.

The second story - among Mexico City's near upper class, is a thousandfold less interesting, and even more condescendingly sermonic than the first. "Daniel and Valeria" tells the tale of a married television producer (Álvaro Guerrero) who leaves his wife and daughters for an up-and-coming model (Goya Toledo) - a giddily self-impressed beauty with a pampered Lhasa Apso named Richie. Though at the opposite end of the universe from Octavio and Susana, Daniel and Valeria prove just as base, and González Iñárritu's imagined god over Mexico City treats them just as badly for their sins. It is with an irony we are meant to savor that the illicit love-home Daniel purchases for them looks out on an advertisment featuring Valeria in a dress lifted as high (and higher) than propriety would dictate so as to show off her long and shapely legs. The lovers' apartment, designed as it were for the preacher's parable, also has a hole in its floor that leads straight to an urban hell of sorts: a nest of rats, where Richie, who has jumped in after a ball, suffers the consequences of the filmmakers' resentment of privilege.

In the last story, "El Chivo and Maru," the bible comes out of the closet and we are confronted in the flesh with Cain and Abel a la Mexicaine - but they are just a flourish of González Iñárritu's would be demagoguery. The greater story - and this the most moving of the three - is that of El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), a one-time revolutionary, some time hired hitman, whose underground hideout is the streets of the city, for which he left his wife and daughter. Their loss still and forever burns him with infernal regret. He surrounds himself in their place with dogs - and it is to them that he gives all his love and tenderness.

Though the most overtly moralistic of the three tales, and no less obvious than the first two, particularly in its cliched final scene, El Chivo's sensitivity (or Echevarria's acting) nonetheless blazes through this final segment to leave us with a sense of momentary meaningfulness.

It is not enough to save the film.

The cinematographic tones are interesting - the acting good to excellent - but the stories, their attitude, and the director's pretension take away whatever that gives us.

CineScene, 2001