Mexico: Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch); 2000; directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Three storylines intertwine in this tale of very different people whose separate lives briefly collide at the scene of a car crash. To begin with, brothers Octavio and Ramiro live together with Ramiro’s wife, Susana, and their son. They’re a struggling and tense family. Ramiro is an angry, abusive cashier by day and thief by night, while Octavio is in love with Susana and harbors a desire to run away with her (though she'll need some convincing about the idea.) His chance arises when their friendly Rottweiler, Cofi, kills a dog fighter’s Pit Bull Terrier. Realizing Cofi’s potential as a fighting dog, Octavio enters the cruel, bloody world of that “sport,” and suddenly starts coming home with a lot of spending money. Meanwhile, he’s sleeping with Susana. However, he has to have his brother taken out after Ramiro threatens Cofi’s life unless he gets half of “their” dog’s winnings (and temporarily disappears with his wife and baby.) Troubles escalate further when Cofi is entered into a high-stakes fight against a German Shepherd Dog. The fight ends abruptly once Cofi is shot; Octavio rushes him to his new car, returns to stab the offender, Jarocho, and then sets off a wild car chase that ends in a horrible collision.

The second plotline follows Brazilian supermodel and media star Valeria, and her lover Daniel, who recently decided to ditch his wife and two daughters for her. Octavio’s car smashed into Valeria’s, leading to the eventual amputation of her badly mangled leg, and of course, to the termination of her highly successful contract with the perfume company Enchant. As time passes her relationship with Daniel becomes troubled as well. Throughout this trying period of Valeria’s life, she enjoys the faithful company of her beloved little dog, Richie, who gets lost for a long time underneath the floorboards of her new apartment after chasing a ball down a hole, but manages to survive again.

In the backdrop of both of the previous stories has been the activity of a mysterious and scruffy old man, who appears to live on the streets, push a cart about, have several mutts for friends…and also be a hired assassin. As it turns out, this man is known as El Chivo (real name Martin), and he abandoned his wife and daughter (Maru) long ago to head out and try to actively change the world. Now, having failed to do so, he has observed his wife’s funeral and watched his daughter living from afar, observing her life in photographs by sneaking into her bedroom. In the meantime, El Chivo rescues Cofi from the car crash and helps him recover from his injury. Sadly, Cofi’s dog-aggression had been encouraged for so long that the Rottweiler ended up killing all of El Chivo’s other canine friends when left alone with them. Distraught, El Chivo moves to shoot Cofi, but cannot bring himself to hurt the dog.

Following that, a man comes to him requesting that he perform one more assassination, something he had no desire to continue doing. In the end, El Chivo kidnaps the target and traps him inside his temporary home with the man who’d claimed he was a cheat and wanted him dead—his half-brother and business partner. Believing that the first brother is a liar, Martin leaves them both tied up with a gun in between them on the floor, to determine their own fates. He and Cofi then leave, and he works up the courage to enter Maru’s home again and leave a message on her telephone, stating his existence and feelings, sorrows, and regrets. He still loves her and wants to see her again someday when he has the courage to do that. Pasting a photo of his old clean-shaven face over an image of his younger one in her bedroom, the old man sets down the frame and leaves once more. Meanwhile, Octavio has also been injured in the accident, but is still determined to run off with the now-angry Susana, who is more resistant than ever.

Love, in all its infinitely varied forms, is the one consistent theme that runs through each of these stories. (Its original Spanish title does the film a little more symbolic and thought-provoking justice than the American one, although the latter is neither untrue nor inapplicable.) Each of the main characters has at least one ‘perro.’ Dogs are generally often used as symbols of pure, perfect, unconditional love. Humans, on the other hand, and definitely in this film, are another story altogether. They can only aspire to what love means for dogs. Most characters here have some dubious morals at best. Susana might arguably be the best overall person in the entire thing. Octavio seems like a good man, and it’s easy at first to like him and hate Ramiro, yet for money Octavio subjects his loyal companion Cofi to brutal fights in which he kills other dogs. Could someone who truly loves his dog do that? He also has his brother beaten and killed--and regardless of how bad a man Ramiro was, or how deserving he may have seemed, or how good it feels to have him out of the picture, this can still raise further questions, objections, and doubts as to Octavio’s conscience, especially when compounded with some of his other actions. Interestingly enough the issue of murdering one’s own brother arose in the last film starring Bernal, and centered on that actor’s character then, too.

Valeria lies to the public about her love life--in reality, she’s with a man who’s been having an affair, cheating on his wife, and leaving her for the model. Apparently, Valeria has no problem with any of that, despite Daniel’s daughters; in fact, she openly disrespects his family and considers them stupid. And El Chivo/Martin was a complicated, conflicted person: an idealistic, opinionated, headstrong guerilla who believed in making positive changes in the world; a paid assassin who manipulated and tortured and took human life, but still respected it, and eventually wanted to end his business of killing; a man who had failed as a husband and father but deeply regrets it, and just can’t seem to find the strength to try and reconnect with the only family member he has left.

For all of their failings, those characters and others are not without their ability to love intensely, nor their willingness to do or to sacrifice anything for the sake of that love--be it for a woman (say, an in-law), a man, a cause (perhaps worldly justice), a wife, a daughter, or, indeed, a dog.

As a fanatical dog lover, I liked this movie partially due to their significant presence, but naturally found the fighting scenes very difficult to watch--more because of the knowledge that such hideously evil acts occur in real life than anything else. At least, I would very much hope that by the year 2000 no animals would have to be harmed in the making of a movie, even in countries that possibly don’t have a set-monitoring entity equivalent to the American Humane Association. Sadly, this cruelty persists in parts of the world. What I read on the IMDb, however, regarding the dogs being heavily sedated in order to appear dead, was hopefully a harmless truth.



The other technical and narrative aspects of the film were mostly superb as well and synthesized perfectly, from the basic staging of shots to the skillful interweaving of the three plotlines. In particular I felt that it was quite well cast and acted. Each performer (including the dogs) was very real and believable in his or her role, and seemed to have fully inhabited it. The characters felt alive. The slower, more subtle dramatic sequences were counterbalanced by moments of great suspense throughout, meaning that the issue of the film’s potentially being a tad overlong is not an unbearable fault.