Amores Perros (2000) is in a permanent state of keyed-up. You’re never at ease while watching it — almost everything about it is assaultive. We’re thrust into its anxious forward motion right away. It begins with a high-speed car chase that ends, almost as quickly as it had started, with the pursued driver rashly running a red and then straight into another car. The offending driver, with a bleeding-to-death Rottweiler in his backseat and a screeching companion at his side, is named Octavio (Gael García Bernal, in his feature debut and the movie’s most magnetic presence).
He is, we’ll learn, one of several principal characters in a movie transfixed by humanity’s interconnectedness. Amores Perros comprises three vignette-style stories; all its characters are linked by the film’s introductory car crash and the significant presence of dogs in all their lives. (I think it’s important to note here that Amores Perros is not a movie tailored to dog-lovers, though; all its canine actors are put through so much in the course of the movie that the film’s director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, thankfully includes the disclaimer that no animals were harmed during production at the top of the movie rather than, as is the norm, at its end alongside the credits.)
Amores Perros is brutal and unremittingly miserable; you feel its two and a half hours. But you’re compulsively fascinated by its chief characters, who while separated by both class and circumstance are living lives of approximate and extreme desperation that will, by the end of the movie, remain insecure. We gather the worst is yet to come after we’ve seen the last of them. The first — and also, because of its climatic car crash, inciting — story in Amores Perros follows teenage Octavio as he gets happenstantially involved with dogfighting. He’s hoping to raise enough money to “run away” with his even-more-heartless brother Ramiro (Marco Pérez)’s young and regularly black-eyed wife Susana (Vanessa Bauche), whom he is obsessed with “saving.”
The second orbits around the charmed Spanish supermodel, Valeria (Goya Toledo), who drove the car Octavio crashed into. The film charts what will become a miserable recovery. As if her severely broken leg weren’t bad enough, her treasured fluffball of a dog falls under a broken floorboard in her new apartment and remains stuck for days. Her contract with a major fashion brand is summarily canceled. And she and her publisher boyfriend (Álvaro Guerrero), who recently left his wife and kids for her, keep having fights that suggest his big domestic sacrifice might not have been worth it.
The third story — which also features the movie’s most easily sympathetic character (which is saying something) — is about a hitman who witnesses the traffic accident. He’s so unkempt, and is so loyally followed by a coterie of pet dogs, that people assume he’s homeless. The film delves into his sad and affecting (albeit unsurprisingly morally cloudy) backstory; it lends his character a greater expansiveness than other members of the ensemble.
Amores Perros’ trio of tales forms a logical progression that goes beyond merely fleshing out an explosive and tragic scenario and exploring its many ramifications. It forms what feels like a Frankenstein’s monster of a single life. It begins with an unduly optimistic young someone questing, if wrong-headedly, for success; continues with a person having it and then abruptly losing it; then concludes with someone who is so far removed from any semblance of contentment, with little chance of it returning, that an adopted existence functioning sort of as a masquerade turns into a coping mechanism.
Iñárritu would try out this same sort of multi-storied, we’re-all-connected kind of storytelling again with his next two movies, 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), which, like Amores Perros, were written by Guillermo Arriaga. It’s widely agreed that the latter — the progenitor that put Iñárritu on the map as a potential great — remains the freshest, most thrilling. (Only having seen 21 Grams of those two spiritual successors, I’m inclined to think the consensus is on the money.)
There’s a real zest in Iñárritu’s direction. This was his first feature, and you can sense, as is common watching a particularly strong debut, how much bottled-up energy is being released. It’s infectious. The film’s amoral stories are told with immediacy and force; you care about the fates of a set of characters (if not exactly the characters themselves) that are majority-reprehensible. Though Iñárritu’s visuals are ugly — the color is hyper-desaturated (descriptions that come to mind are “icy” or “clammy”) likely in a ploy to stamp out any color-assisted suggestions of warmth or hope — it’s still an admirably very physical, probing visual style. Amores Perros is engrossingly restless. You feel drained when you’re done watching it, though not in a negative sense, necessarily. It can just be tiring to be legitimately engaged by a movie fixed in a prolonged breaking point.
This dreary, in-crisis mode has continued for what has become a two-decade-long career for Iñarritu, though not with consistently effective returns. Movies like Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2016), for instance, are comparably frantic and dreary but not as well-realized or absorbing. They’re more like sheer exercises in misery. This is a pejorative Amores Perros comes close to epitomizing but never quite does. It’s always toeing the line between gratuitous- and vital-feeling suffering. Ultimately it’s the vitality we feel.
Peterson Reviews 