Dog is man's best friend, but why? We prize their companionship, their loyalty, the funny way their legs twitch when they dream. But perhaps they offer more to us. Could they not also be a meal ticket, a good listener, catharsis, sanity, an accessory? When people become unreliable, maybe we turn to dogs because we feel they need us more than we need them. Of course that isn't true at all, but it is a comforting thought nonetheless.
Amores perros gives a look at the lives of various people on the poor streets of Mexico in three intertwining plots that converge in a horrific car accident. The result is probably the most unrelentingly grim film of 2000. My problems with this movie are ample, but fantastic performances from Gael Garcia Bernal, Goya Toledo, and Emilio Echevarria, as well as genuinely compelling storytelling won me over, and left me rather unsettled. I will present it in the way it was presented to me.
Octavio and Susana:
The film begins on a strong note, following a young man's (Bernal) obsession with his sister-in-law. Octavio lives with Susana and his violent, stupid brother, Ramiro who makes his money by performing armed robberies on the grocery store where he works. Octavio is in love with Susana, and proposes that she run away with him. Susana is hesitant and points out that he has no money.
Ramiro's dog Cofi, a massive rottweiler, had recently killed the champion dog fighter Jorge's prized pit bull, inspiring Octavio's idea to place Cofi in the fights for the money. We then get to spend a third of the film looking at the lucrative world of dog-fighting. Some of the scenes in this vignette were nearly unwatchable. Apparently the dogs in the fight scenes were wearing plastic mouth guards which are clearly visible if you freeze the movie. I, however, did not do this, and the attacking dogs were frightening.
The film opens on Octavio, his friend, and the wounded Cofi fleeing in car while being chased by men with guns. They hit a car. By the middle of his story it clear that a fight with Jorge is the cause, and it was just a matter of seeing how the plot would unfold. The interesting part of Octavio's story is seeing the love triangle play out between him, his brother, and his sister-in-law.
Daniel and Valeria:
Daniel is a family man and the editor of a fashion magazine. He has been cheating on his wife for some time with a model, Valeria (Toledo), and finally leaves his wife for her. The two move into an apartment with their dog, Richie, a little shih tzu. Across the street is a giant poster with a thirty-foot Valeria seducing the neighborhood, the word "ENCHANT" scrawled across the top.
Valeria's car is hit. Wheelchair ridden, she stays in her apartment with Richie all day, staring at her looming poster across her window. One day Richie chases a ball into a hole in the floorboards. Much of the rest of the story watches Daniel and the nearly immobile Valeria as they spend days trying to get the poor Richie out of the floor, while at the same time keep their relationship in tact.Valeria spirals into depression as her career is lost (along with a little more, as you will learn), as Daniel begins missing his family, and poor Richie simply tries not to be eaten by rats.
El Chivo and Maru:
The last story follows a wino, Chivo, as he plans an assassination. All day, trailed by his pack of dogs, he scours garbage cans, and follows a young, mysterious woman who holds some secret to his past. One day he is approached to two men asking Chivo to kill the business partner and half-brother of one of the men. It turns out that Chivo was a Zapatista guerrilla fighter, and that his skills were legendary.
Accepting the job he follows the young man. Two cars crash. Chivo rescues a giant rottweiler from one of the cars and sneaks off with the rest of his canine friends. He nurses the nameless dog back to health as he prepares for something more sinister, and more godlike than simply the taking of a life. That is all I will say about him.
All of these stories are good in and of themselves. They involve complex and intriguing characters with interesting symbolism and creative story arcs. It seems though, that the use of the intertwining story lines was being employed a lot during the end of the 90's and the early 2000's. Following the immensely popular Pulp Fiction it became vogue to create the multiple stories connected in an ironic way. Some of the more popular and critically acclaimed movies of the time did just that: Crash, Magnolia, and Traffic especially, are all very much like this film. And, like Traffic, that problem I had with this film is that some vignettes are far more interesting than the others. I would much rather watch an entire film about the relationship between Octavio and Ramiro--how Ramiro became a masked robber, more about the dog-fighting business--than I would watching a condensed version of the story followed by two others. That is not to say that I would not want to know the other plots, but I do not believe that they were suitable together. The second film would have made an incredible, Oscar worthy, short film at twenty minutes; forty-five was far too long. El Chivo's story could have worked as either and would have been equally as good.
Ambition is admirable, but shoving three really good ideas together does not make a great film.
3/4
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