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| Movies,
Patrick Dickinson,
02:00:00,
01 June 2001 |
Rating: F5
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They tell you they didn't hurt them but you are sure they did. Bursting open with a car chase and crash, Amores Perros is at its most ferocious and controversial with the savage dogfights that take up the first act of the twisting narrative. Images of pumped rottweilers ripping each other to shreds, and limp, extinguished carcasses being dragged through pools of suds and blood are as unforgettable as they are unwatchable.
Here in his "non-western" cinematic world, the debut director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu gives us three stories, neither linear nor pulp fiction cool, but tied by character and circumstance. In equal measure the stories of Octavio's (Gael Garcia) unrequited love, Valerie's (Goya Toledo) fall from grace as a model and El Chivo's (Emilio Echevarria) struggle with his rebel past all mimic and reflect each other, yet are also single and solitary. This narrative bunching of threads, but also desire to keep them taught, separate and spontaneous, is reminiscent of P.T.Anderson's Magnolia and films that dare play with the story, not shying from frayed loose ends.
Using a silver tint on the negative, supposedly against the poor light of Mexico City, so "sad and grey", the film has a depth and colour to it that seems unreal, almost dreamlike. Tied with this the handheld, documentary style camera work, following each urban character like an inquisitive child, gives a tension between the ideal and the real, the desired and the given, that suggests the frictions that heat the film. For each central character is filled with love and desires that life simply wont let them have. The semi-incestuous love of a bother for his sister-in-law, the love of a woman for a married man, and the love of a revolutionary for the daughter who thinks him gone. With their dogs at their side these frustrated souls strive against obstacle and chance to find their idealised lives. Visited by maiming injuries, pain and poverty they suffer for their dreams, even fail their dreams, but with the love that they feel they live on and walk a road of possible hope. If only they hadn't felt that love.
UK rating:
18
US rating:
R
Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Emilio Echevarria, Goya Toledo, Alvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche.
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