The film has an unusually prominent disclaimer at the beginning stating that no animals were harmed in the making of the movie. The reason for putting in giant letters up front what is usually in small print at the end of the credits is that the movie contains several dogfights. The fights aren't as bad as I'd been led to believe from the numerous warnings I'd read -- it's fairly obvious that the dogs aren't doing real harm to each other in the brief flashes when you actually see them fighting. All the serious wounding is done off camera, and though there's copious blood, it's been a long, long time since movie blood bothered me. (Some of you may feel differently.) Not to say that you don't feel for the poor dogs, because of course you do. Even if some of them look like those goddamn Presa Canarios that killed that woman in San Francisco.
In the first storyline, "Octavio and Susana," a gentle young man lusts after his brutal brother's wife; to raise money so he can run away with her, Octavio puts his loyal dog Cofi in dogfights, earning the ire of the local thug whose dogs Cofi regularly kills. Gael García Bernal is quite good as Octavio, blending sweetness and caring with brutality and selfishness. This plot line is the most energetic, dashing about so frenetically that it's not until after you leave the theater that you realize the drama inherent in these characters is never really fulfilled.
The second storyline is "Daniel and Valeria": a married man leaves his wife for a glamorous, spoiled model who is disfigured in a car crash (with Octavio's car) and who loses her pampered lap dog under the floorboards of her apartment. (Reading the reviews, I see a lot of critics comparing this storyline to Luis Buñuel's work. Since I've never seen any of his work, I don't know what this means. I suspect it's something to do with surrealistic dark comedy. Maybe you know.) This plotline seemed out of place to me, perhaps because it mostly took place in an apartment, while the rest of the movie raced through the grimy streets of Mexico City. Plus, both characters were intensely unlikable, and neither actor was especially good.
The third storyline, "El Chivo and Maru," was the most interesting to me. El Chivo is an unkempt old man wandering the streets with a pack of dogs -- incidentally, he's also a hit man. Maru is the daughter he abandoned when she was 2; she is now a grown woman, and he yearns to make contact with her. His obstacles: (1) he is ashamed of the way he has lived his life and (2) she thinks he is dead. Emilio Echevarría as El Chivo is by far the best actor in this movie, giving the ragged old man dignity and humor. Again, though, after the movie, it occurred to me how little we really found out about El Chivo's inner life, besides that he misses his daughter. It seems like a rich vein to mine, yet it was left untouched.
I'm a little confused how so many critics compare Amores Perros to so many other movies, everything from Pulp Fiction to Go to Traffic to Magnolia, yet in the next paragraph gush about its "breathtaking" or "overpowering" originality. I didn't see very much here I haven't seen before (in fact, I thought the opening sequence was an homage to Reservoir Dogs, but upon viewing the scene in Reservoir Dogs I thought it was copying, it turns out I was mostly wrong. Mostly.). The originality seems to be that it's from Mexico and shows us the slums and the luxuries of Mexico City. Well, okay, that's new, and that's interesting, and that's well done. But it doesn't make this a masterpiece.
The jiggling, handheld camera work is intrusive and highly annoying. A good cinematographer shouldn't distract you from the movie, but that's what's happens here all too often. Done properly, as it frequently is in this movie, a handheld camera shot gives you a sense of urgency and intimacy. Done improperly, as it sometimes is in this movie, it gives you the sense of an epileptic on a trampoline.
With the exceptions of the actors named above, few of the performances stand out, and that general flatness hurts the movie. There are so many characters, with so few likable traits among them, that you develop an attachment only to the two that stand out, El Chivo and Octavio. This is a movie that is less than the sum of its parts. But, it is ambitious, and it deserves praise for that. It is a first movie (by Alejandro González Iñárritu), an accomplished one, and it deserves praise for that. It vividly shows us a world most of us will never see, and I praise it for that. But it is not deeply meaningful, it is not overwhelmingly powerful, it is not a masterpiece -- it is not even the movie that should have beaten Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Best Foreign Language Film, as a few critics have dared to suggest (I will hear no words against the tiger and the dragon).
If you haven't read any of the orgasmic reviews panted out by major critics, it may seem like I'm being harsh, but I'm just trying to provide some balance. I figured to discount the hype before seeing the movie, but after seeing it, I can't even figure out where they came up with it. If, in reading about Amores Perros as a gritty, fairly violent, serious, long, complex film about relationships and dogfights in Mexico City, you said to yourself, "Now that, I have to see," go right on in to the theater -- you will find at least as much to admire as I did and, quite possibly, more. (I'm not being snide -- that's just what I said to myself when reading about this movie.) If you read the above description and think, "I'll stay away from such unpleasantness unless it's superlative" -- save your money. If you read some more-educated critic than I rhapsodizing about Buñuel and surrealism and symbolism and meta-anything -- well, either brush it off as the foppish puffery of a guy who wants you to know how much smarter and more educated he is than you, or be that guy.
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