| A good film will challenge your assumptions about life, but a great one will change them altogether. In that sense, Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) is a good film, not a great one, because it proposes some bleak truths about human nature, but it fails to fully subvert the status quo.
The first feature from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu is an exploration of life in Mexico City that looks at the nature of love, loyalty and the arbitrariness of fate in the urban metropolis. This is a Mexico we rarely see in the movies – gritty, contemporary – and Iñarritu’s background in radio and television media has obviously given him some insight. His vision seems authentic as he portrays both the dirty barrios and upscale highrises as desperate places where brothers betray one another, men desert their families and kindness is almost never motivated by altruism – and when it is, it is punished.
Yet, for all this misanthropy, Amores Perros isn’t completely pessimistic because it balances its hopelessness with humour. Structured as three loosely interconnected stories that revolve around a car accident and a recurring dog motif, it breaks down this way – the stories that involve big dogs are serious, and the one involving a small dog is funny. As a description, that may be a bit flippant, but that’s about the, er, size of it.
The stories themselves are unexceptional – in the first, one young man tries to convince his brother’s wife to escape her abusive relationship and run away with him. In the second, a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis leaves his wife and children for a fashion model. In the third, a former communist guerilla who now makes a meagre living as a hit-man is asked to kill a man’s stepbrother.
All three parts are concerned, no matter how obliquely, with the nature of either fraternal, parental or marital betrayal. Love is not regarded as a redeeming quality, but instead as a manifestation of desperation, an attempt to rationalize our animal nature in perfectly irrational terms. Of course, the environment we inhabit is not much concerned with our reactions to it, and, in this respect, Amores Perros is one of the most naturalistic films imaginable – the parallels it draws between human and canine behaviour are completely justifiable.
Ultimately, the subtext of the film is that, despite our ability to love and to rationalize, men are dogs, not to be trusted and almost entirely without redemption. This is where the film breaks down, because it seems to want to offer some hope to cling to, but it can’t escape the harshness of its own terms. In a sense, if it were less compromising, it would be even more effective, but as it stands it’s still a weighty piece of work that might just make you wonder who let the dogs out. |
