Amores Perros

“Amores Perros,” the 2000 Foreign Language Oscar nominee from Mexico, is an outstanding film, one that should be seen by anyone with a real interest in film, or at least those willing to sample something outside the mainstream. Long and challenging, perhaps even difficult, the movie is set in Mexico, and the dialogue is entirely in Spanish (subtitled, in some cases imperfectly). It is photographed in washed out grays and browns (similar to the Mexican sequences in “Traffic”). Almost relentlessly grim, and shot through with a kind of third world fatalism, “Amores Perros” succeeds on the basis of its vivid characterizations and its unblinking view of life in modern day Mexico. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu from a script by Guillermo Arriaga Jordan, “Amores Perros” (which, loosely translated, means “Love’s a bitch”) features an exceptionally well cast group of actors, the most famous of whom is probably completely unknown in the United States. The movie tells three individual stories, which intersect only tangentially. In the first story, a young man named Octavio falls in love with Susana, his brother Ramiro’s wife. In the second story, a seemingly deranged old man, El Chivo, is hired to assassinate a businessman’s brother, only to find himself redeemed by the events that follow.

In the third story, Daniel, a middle-aged man, leaves his family to take up with Valeria, a famous model. Each story unfolds in unexpected ways, and part of the pleasure of the picture is watching Iñárritu take these three narrative lines and spin them masterfully off of each other. The movie opens explosively, with a furious car chase and crash, and from there it shifts back and forth in time, and between the three story lines. Therefore, it takes a while before the connections between the characters emerge. Eventually, though, we begin to see “Amores Perros” for what it is, a movie that is ultimately about family, and all the painful, difficult connections that family members share. Much has been made of the role that dogs play in the picture. “Amores Perros” is full of dogs. There are happy dogs, sad dogs, angry dogs, and dead dogs. Lots of dead dogs, in fact, and, despite the reassuring disclaimer at the beginning of the film, the sight of them is a bit jolting.

But the movie does not shy away from the harsh reality of a dog’s life any more than it shies away from the harsh reality of human lives. The dogs serve as a point of connection between the stories. Octavio enters Ramiro’s dog in a series of brutal dogfights, in order to make enough money to run away with Susana. El Chivo, who abandoned his real family long ago, has created a new family, all dogs. The fate of Valeria’s small dog serves as a flashpoint in her relationship with Daniel. The dogs are surrogate families, companions, and breadwinners. There are two pitfalls one encounters when watching a film in a foreign language. One is that the language barrier and the very foreign “character” of the picture prove to be too much of a barrier for the viewer. Foreign language films struggle to find an audience in this country, and even for those who make the effort, those barriers can be daunting.

But the flip side of the coin is the tendency to attribute to a foreign language film certain qualities that it does not possess, seduced as we may be by the exotic nature of the locations and the characters. If nothing else, it is difficult to judge the dialogue, reduced as we are to reading subtitles. How are we to gauge the authenticity and the subtlety of language when we do not speak it? Still, good stories with strong themes are universal, no matter where they are set, and images transcend language, which is what gives film its power in the first place. “Amores Perros” has all of these qualities. It will reward the adventurous viewer with a memorable experience, and leaves little doubt that we will be seeing more from its talented director in the future. (5/5/2001)