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Mexican Dog Tales -- Amores Perros

© John Nesbit

Amores Perros has been tagged in America as Mexico's parallel to Pulp Fiction for marketing purposes, or perhaps the director has taken the easy way out by copying Quentin Tarantino's narrative style. While Alejandro González Iñárritu's film shares some of the structural elements of Tarantino's modern classic, its three stories are nowhere as integrated. They all share a common point in time and place, beginning with a car accident in the mean streets of Mexico City, and all three separate stories involve relationship problems and dogs. In fact, the two better stories even share the same dog.

Tarantino may have popularized juxtaposing narratives that have a tenuous fated relationship, but this structure has been around since at least 74 years. In 1927 Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge Over San Luis Rey, which becomes a meditation on Fate as it begins with the collapse of a footbridge in Peru and then delves into the lives of the people who perish. Taking this same concept of intertwining lives through a weird twist of fate, Hitchcock turned the conceit into a true art form and dazzled us for years.

So now we have younger filmmakers doing this more loosely, pumping up the pace to match Go! , and expecting to gain arthouse status. Not that Iñárritu's film is undeserving - two-thirds of it actually works pretty well. Had the director chosen to chop out the unnecessary third to reduce its 2.5 hour running time to a more appropriate 2-hour running time, I'd give this film another half star or so.

Amores Perros looks very gritty, filmed with a sepia filter (like Traffic) with a lot of hand held cameras to give us a feeling that we are truly experiencing the rough street life of Mexico City. If you've been across the border, you may even think that you can smell the fried tortillas and tacos, in this breakthrough independent Mexican film. We could get even more a sense of the urban blight if they passed out air filters to breathe through while watching the film.

The film immediately thrusts us into a dark underworld of Mexican machismo with some brutal and bloody images of dog fighting. Fortunately, the movie prepares us with an opening notice that no dogs were harmed during the filming; otherwise, people would be leaving the theater in masses. If you see someone enter the film after those opening credits, do them a favor - tell them that the actual dogs are all ok. Otherwise, those pitiful people will NOT have a chance to enjoy what's on screen if they like dogs at all.