Word: inarritu
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Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu wanted a "big bang" at the center of his astonishing first feature, Amores Perros--something that would slap it into rambunctious life, rather as the bigger astronomical bang did our universe eons ago. He found it in the car crash that opens his movie--a sudden, sickening blend of violently torn metal, wailing sirens, desperate screams and blood--lots of blood...
...intricately structured screenplay by novelist Guillermo Arriaga keeps reverting, ever more intimately and horrifically, to that crash, not merely showing it as the major figures in three intertwined stories experience it but also letting us see their lives prior to and after the disaster that radically reshapes their fates. Inarritu, 37, who has made hundreds of TV commercials in Mexico City, consciously intends his movie to be a portrait of his "dangerous, beautiful" hometown. The film is muy espanol, a portrait that blends harsh realism with a curious tenderness. It is also muy Bunuel, but without his conscious surrealism...
...Princess Di ..." That sense that even hair-trigger lives, always poised on the edge of self-destructive lunacy, deserve to be sympathetically understood is Amores Perros' redeeming grace. It is what separates its sudden, apparently motiveless episodes of violence from the kind of standard-issue "frivolous entertainment violence" that Inarritu volubly deplores. It also helps explain the film's enigmatic title, which translates roughly as "Love Is Like...
Their stories don't relate narratively; they just glance off one another. But they do relate emotionally, "conceptually." As Inarritu says, "It's very simple: you get to know people through their dogs." Take Octavio. His relationship with Cofi is amiable but casual--until a rival handler shoots the dog, whereupon the frenzied Octavio stabs the would-be killer and rushes into his near fatal accident, as maddened by the threat to Cofi as he is by his lover's hesitations and ambiguities...
Except that, unlike Octavio and Valeria, El Chivo is shrewd enough to recognize something of himself in the killer dog, and to begin to make peace with his haunted past. It may be too late for any full-scale reconciliations, but his is the only hopeful story Inarritu tells, the one that catches this aspect of his belief: "We lose our innocence, our looks, our loves, finally life itself. We are what we lose...