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Mind-blowing
Posted Wed, 18 Apr 2001
| Our Rating |  |
Reviewer | Leigh Robertson |
| Rated | PG 16LV |
| Running Time | 150 mins |
| Starring | Gael Garcia Bernal, Emilio Echevarriá, Goya Toledo, Vanessa Bauche |
| Screenplay | Alejandro González Iñárritu |
| Director | Alejandro González Iñárritu |
| Website | http://amoresperros.com |
| Movie Details | The Internet Movie Database |
If lite and frothy, feel-good films are your kind of thing, stop reading this review NOW! However, if you have a heart for powerful, poetic narrative, for hard-hitting sequences that are as sensitive and highly moral as they are often devastatingly violent, and for clever scripting and mind-blowing cinematography, read on.
The directorial debut of Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores Perros – which translates from the Spanish as “Love is a Bitch” - is definitely not the average kind of film you’d see coming out of Hollywood, all linear narratives and happy endings.
But it has, since its sensational world premiere at Cannes, been recognised even by Tinsel Town as a master work, winning an impressive array of prizes internationally. It was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, which, this reviewer believes, it deserves to have won.
González Iñárritu is not afraid of pushing the boundaries of the viewer’s experience of his film, constantly challenging you out of your passive state as a mere observer. Depicting an often harrowing view of life in Mexico City - complete with illegal dog fighting, competitive businessmen wanting to snuff each other and the perils of a life too glamorous - the film is very real and is brutally honest at all times. And it’s no cool, Tarantino-style blood-fest, all gratuitous violence and designer gangsters, either.
The vastly ambitious story is told in three interweaving narratives, where the lives of several inhabitants of this city of contradictions quite literally collide in a shattering sequence of events, a moment on which the film appears to be hinged.
There’s the young Octavio who’s in love with his hoodlum brother Ramiro’s unhappy, abused wife, Susana. Then there’s Daniel, a successful editor, who gives up his comfortable home, wife and children to move in with the shallow, neurotic supermodel, Valeria. Lastly – though by no means less important – is the vagrant-hit man El Chivo, surrounded by his beloved dogs and haunted by a secret relationship with a pretty, young woman.
Through the lives of these people – and their interactions with their and other dogs, an interesting and complex leitmotif - the film explores the themes of love, death, hope, betrayal, anxiety, pain, selfishness and sin, always with the utmost sincerity and with immense sensitivity to the characters. And for all the film’s harshness, even darkness, it is illuminated by a magnificent, though raw, beauty and an emotional intensity that’ll leave you breathless.
Significantly, as González Iñárritu was once a top Mexico City deejay, music plays an important role in the film. Renowned musician and music producer Gustavo Santaolalla, joined by an eclectic assortment of artists, composed an original score, using PVC pipes, custard moulds, tin-can violins, an Indian harmonium, and his guitar to create the film’s bold and inventive sound.
What remains to be said about Amores Perros is so vast that this reviewer could go off on even more of a tangent. So I’ll just say this: don’t be put off by the fact that it is two and a half hours long or that there are subtitles. The film is so engaging and gripping that you really don’t even think about it.
And if the cold stare of reality doesn’t send you fleeing to the malls - this one’s for you!
Go see it.
