The Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut, Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) (2000), is the perfect antidote to Valentine’s Day fever. It butchers any stale romantic notions about love being seductively eating praline truffles in a rose-petal-and-puppy-littered velvet bed looking out on a swan-filled lake. This ain’t The Notebook and Mexico City ain’t your average city-of-love honeymoon destination. In this film it’s the home of underground dog fighting circles, violence, fear, loss, betrayal and – at the centre of all that – forbidden love. What’s so refreshing about this ‘love film’ is that it does not glamourize love – it presents it at its extremes – and, although compelling, they are not romantically appealing.
Amores Perros has all the trademarks of Iñárritu’s later more famous, multi-lingual and multi-cultural films (Babel and 21 Grams): interconnecting storylines, symbols and concerns. The appeal and success of his films lies partly in the seamlessness of his intricate plots and in his ability to connect (with) different cultures and classes. Amores Perros is his most ‘Mexican’ film. Mexico City (and its underground culture) is a subject as well as setting of his film (although it is actually his only film fully set in Mexico City); the soundtrack is almost entirely composed of contemporary Mexican music (with the valid exception of some Moby); and, not only did it introduce the world to whom we now consider to the pretty face of Latin American cinema – Gael Garcia Bernal – but, more importantly, it placed Mexican Cinema back on the map all together after a long period of creative rut and non-acclaim by the international film community.
Close-up: Gael Garcia Bernal as Octavio watching a dog fight
The film follows three main interweaving storylines that come together on a plot-level most explicitly in a single car crash. [*alarm bells* Crash (2004)? I am convinced that Amores Perros was its main source of inspiration]. Storyline set-up number 1 (DISCLAMER: spoilers contained): the love affair between Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his sister-in-law, Susana. Their relationship develops in the tense environment of a claustrophobic apartment in the mean streets of Mexico City, which they share with her husband/his brother, his mother and her baby. Octavio attempts to get some money together in order to run away with Susana. He achieves this by betting on his dog to win dog fights, but this plan is ruined by the discovery that his brother has run off with Susana and Octavio’s saved money, which Octavio needs the next day to bet on his biggest fight yet. As a result the next day he gets into a pickle with the local mafia and (I won’t explain why), in a scene that screams Reservoir Dogs, has to flee the city with a bleeding dog in the backseat of his car…Cue: Car Crash. Storyline set-up 2: Daniel, a well-to-do husband and father, leaves his family and moves into a swanky apartment with Valeria, the model he has been having an affair with, and her dog. Everything is fine and dandy until she is seriously injured in a car crash, which radically alters her physical appearance: the relationship becomes increasingly fraught, Valeria suffers great psychological trauma and Daniel starts to question his choice. Storyline 3: An old man living in a derelict building site with his many dogs tries to contact his adult daughter, whom he left many years ago and promised never to see again and who does not know that he even exists.
Deep focus: Daniel and Valeria's apartment
Unlike the inventively-named film Crash, the car crash does not feel like the pivotal moment of the film (apart from structurally), or even the main connecting thread of the three stories: the three storylines are connected throughout by subtle and banal moments or scenes in which characters unwittingly encounter each other, by thematic concerns and variations of symbols. Certain symbols crop up in all three plot strands – namely, prison bars and dogs. The prison bar symbolism is fairly explicit in the film: all the characters feel trapped by their love in an inescapable set of circumstances. Only one character leaves his environment at the very end of the film, but this ending could either be bleak or hopeful. The dog symbolism is more unusual – never have dogs featured so prominently in a film concerning love since 101 Dalmations. Apart from presenting the opportunity for a great-sounding title and an all-right pun (just to clarify: the Spanish title also contains the dual meaning of ‘dog’ and ‘bitch’), the various dogs serve to symbolize the particular nature of love in each of the separate storylines.
Wide-angle shot: The old ex-guerrila in his dilapidated make-shift bedroom with a picture of his daughter on the wall.
Although the three plots are cohesively and convincingly linked, they are starkly separated by their cinematographic styles. The claustrophobia and violence the first story line is soaked in are conveyed in and partly created by the jerky camera movements and close-ups. The long scenes and deep focus shots, which characterize the second part of the film, place much importance on the apartment as the locus for the relationship’s demise: they create a tension between the calmness of the interior space and the bubbling undercurrent of frustration in the relationship. Panoramas and wide-angle shots make the third storyline appropriately enigmatic and poetic. But what is the purpose and effect of having three interweaving storylines, which easily contain the potential to be three separate films? This plot structure gives the film an epic feel, but, more importantly, it points out both the universality of a particular emotion and its radically different facets and manifestation when it forces people to extremes. The three separate storylines (except the whole point is that they are NOT entirely separate) are superficially totally different, but, the film gradually reveals their points of surprising similarity.
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