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Iñárritu has, in fact, been defending his film’s use of violence since it premiered last year at Cannes since then, he’s also had to weather the sort of rhetorical overstatement that can smother a film with expectations. In the end, it would be easier to forgive the film its reductive, almost gleeful social Darwinism - dog eat dog, man kill man - if Iñárritu and Arriaga admitted that they were less interested in the misery of their characters than in telling a kick-ass story. That wouldn’t be anything to carp about if the film, unlike the American independents it resembles, didn’t also try to prove its seriousness by pasting on some spuriously left politics. The coarse grain and saturated colors, especially in the first and third stories, are meant to give the film a rough authenticity, something like street flavor, but the story is too-well-polished, hermetically sealed, so that the visual grit feels inorganic, applied rather than owned. But there’s something overly studied, almost clinical, in how it all pulls together. In this precisely, impressively controlled debut feature (Iñárritu either has fantastic discipline or his heart beats very slowly), everything looks and moves just right - the actors, the dogs and the camera never take a wrong turn.
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In a film in which form trumps content at every juncture, it’s no great surprise that the model’s ill fortune has the feel of a calculated gesture, a stratagem rather than an angry, radical cry from the heart. (It probably doesn’t help that she looks as northern European as Susana looks indigenously Mexican.) Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga struggle to obscure their sadism under a patina of politics - it’s no accident that the woman, the indulged mistress of a rich married man, pampers that lap dog - but the story is so drawn out, so needlessly cruel, that it comes off more sour than smart. The rest of his characters aren’t as lucky, especially the supermodel of the second story (Goya Toledo), who seems to earn her comeuppance simply because she’s a willowy blond in love with her own smashing beauty. Iñárritu doesn’t indulge these unhappy three - whose story tries for something bigger, more meaningful, than soap-opera squalor - but neither does he treat them with contempt. Like the rottweiler, or the stinging scorpion of legend, all are disastrously true to their nature. The human characters are Octavio (Gael García Bernal), his feral older brother, Luis (Jorge Salinas, as terrifying as any pit dog), and Luis’ wayward, emotionally blurred wife, Susana (Vanessa Bauche).
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The first story, a grubby love triangle with two brothers and one wife, is the hardest to take, though less for the illicit humping than for the sight of dead dogs pulled from the fighting pits like trash, their slack tongues jutting obscenely. The film opens with a nod to Reservoir Dogs, only this time it’s a hound bleeding in the back seat, not Tim Roth the Tarantino influence continues with the film’s three-part form, though with fewer narrative kinks than Pulp Fiction. Part of the film’s kick is its structure, three separate but thematically linked stories, each involving humans and the dogs that mirror them (usually for the worse): a killer rottweiler, a fluffy white dust mop, a fraternity of broken-down strays. The great German philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism - it’s a tenet for which Amores Perros seems made to order. Ripping, cutting, killing - the dogs of the film’s nastily punning title tear into one another until their muzzles are foamy with gore. The guiding principle here isn’t Arturo Ripstein, the country’s reigning art-house auteur it’s Quentin Tarantino, although, because the setting is Mexico City, where the streets are apparently even meaner than they are in Hollywood, it’s not just bullets that tear into flesh, it’s dog teeth.
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To that end, the film is as free of the stunned-by-the-sun torpor and fog of Catholic mysticism familiar from many Mexican films as it is absent genuine aesthetic risk. Pulsing with energy and wild style, it was directed by 37-year-old Alejandro González Iñárritu, a talented first-timer and former DJ who’s given his hometown of Mexico City a commercial beat to which the rest of the world can easily groove. If you haven’t fled the theater 20 minutes into the new Mexican film Amores Perros, you’ll be hooked until the end.