Copydog

Amores Perros wins praise for being a Mexican film that looks like an American one.

Amores Perros

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
A Lions Gate release



Dog day afternoon: El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría) enjoys a smoke and some canine company.

The foreign film is dead. Long live the foreign film.

By now, it’s common knowledge that American independents have gradually taken the place of foreign-language art films over the last decade or so, to the point where it hasn’t been uncommon to see all 13 Ritz-controlled Philadelphia screens filled with English-language films. There are indications the pendulum may be swinging back — at present, the combined Ritzes house six foreign-language films (seven if you count Traffic, with its long stretches of Spanish dialogue) and four set in other countries, leaving Memento, with its British director and Australian star, and Pollock the closest to a traditional Amerindie.

But there’s no question the Sundance-spawned dominance of flashy, Tarantino-inspired, Miramax-promulgated pseudo-indies has had its effect on the international marketplace. Lars von Trier successfully transformed himself from a ponderous, old-fashioned art director into a hip, self-conscious pop artist, and stateside acclaim quickly followed. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon shattered the box office record for foreign films — its current take of $115 million puts it high above Life is Beautiful’s $57 million — by reaching out to both the traditional art-house crowd (with its placid interludes and sweeping vistas) and the action junkies who lapped up Face/Off and The Matrix (all the jumping and kicking stuff). In other words, those foreign films are best which are least foreign; the less they stink of art, the closer they are to their attention-getting American comrades, the larger their audience and (often) the better the critical response. There’s nothing wrong with such cultural mélange, of course; such is the alchemy of which great art is often made. But the danger in elevating only those foreign films which approximate American films should be obvious. Ignore the native styles of other countries and the art-plex starts looking like an inbred family reunion.

Which brings us to the case of Amores Perros. The first feature by Mexican commercial director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the film — whose title is translated as Love’s a Bitch— received a practically unprecedented (at least for a foreign film) write-up in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back. Lynn Hirschberg, normally employed as a celebrity profiler, pulled out all the stops in her profile of the hitherto-unknown Mexican director, calling his film "the most ambitious and dazzling movie to emerge from Latin America in three decades" — a statement whose absurdity should be obvious even to those with no knowledge of Latin American cinema. (It’s exceedingly doubtful that Hirschberg, who ordinarily spends her time cozying up to Hollywood’s power elite, has a comprehensive grasp of the subject.) That the Times Magazine, which normally devotes itself to movie stars, should lavish several pages on this basically unheard-of film was a serious shock — at least, until I saw the picture.

Amores Perros opens with a jagged shot of a dog bleeding to death in the back seat of a car as it rushes through the Mexico City streets, the driver and his passenger yelling frantically at each other. It’s soon obvious that the reason for their panic is the flame-detailed pickup truck hot on their tale, and the unidentified, handgun-clutching arm protruding from its window. A few seconds later and BAM!, the car slams into another, and all is shattered glass and bloody chaos.

In case that opening scene hasn’t tipped the scales, the film’s most pressing influence becomes clear when we see the title card "Octavio y Susana" flash on the screen; We are most definitely in QT-land. Iñárritu has other mentors, to be sure, Kieslowski and Buñuel among them. But as its frenetic opener — which, as critic Armond White said of the pre-credits zinger in American Beauty, is a good indication of how television aesthetics have corrupted film art — makes clear, Amores Perros has no greater imperative than to hold its audience’s attention by consistently shocking them to their senses. It’s art for people with short attention spans.

"Octavio y Susana" turns out to be the first of three stories, each linked by obsessive love and physical carnage. The first deals with a penniless dreamer (Gael García Bernal) whose infatuation with the wife of his abusive brother leads him to turn the family dog into a killing machine, in hopes of winning enough dogfighting cash to spirit her away. In "Daniel y Valeria," a fashion model’s budding romance with a married magazine publisher is imperiled, first when her prize pup falls through a hole in the floor of their love nest (he doesn’t have enough money to fix it) and later when a traumatic accident threatens her livelihood and sense of self. In "El Chivo y Maru," the elderly, decrepit figure who has shuffled his way through each of the first two vignettes is revealed as a hit man (Emilio Echevarría) whose gaggle of street mutts cannot fill the hole left by his estrangement from his young daughter.

The parallels between these stories are easy — too easy — to find, and though Iñárritu deftly interweaves and overlaps them (like Kieslowski’s Three Colors crammed into two and a half hours), the overall effect is less than the sum of its parts. Rather than expressing its themes, the film’s structure seems like an attempt to present them as more complicated than they really are, and the film’s reliance on violence to propel the narrative is hackneyed and tiresome. (In the absence of much else, the film is at least notable for being the only one in memory to open with the disclaimer that no animals were harmed during its filming.) The Times is hardly alone in its effusive praise — Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir also weighed in with an early outright rave — and the film was cleverly picked as Mexico’s official entry for the 2000 Oscars, where it picked up a nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film (where it, of course, lost to the aforementioned Crouching Tiger). It seems like Americans are tripping over themselves in their haste to praise this Mexican director for learning to make films exactly the way we do. Iñárritu certainly has talent, and if he has artistic integrity to match, he might avoid being swallowed alive by Hollywood (like compatriots Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro) and make a truly worthwhile film someday. There’s no question he has style to burn. The problem is, right now, nothing’s cooking.