Love is a...

Three anecdotes are in a zigzag movement. No correlation as such, no overlapping or any connection. All three stories are tied up in different threads but meet in a same shot, which approach to the viewers in different intervals. Everything finally summed up Amores Perros.

One story focuses on a young mother and her association to her brother-in-law. The second narrates about an ad-businessman who leaves his family for a gorgeous model. In the third a disillusioned ex-revolutionary, playing his criminal trade and obsessed about his daughter.

This was the introductory feature film of Gonzales Inarritu and no doubt he mastered the art of visceral excitements and cinematic dynamism in his earliest. It never pauses to hold a viewer's concentration, simply as a result of the pulsating energy it displays and the coarse tension it manages to sustain, over two and half hours. All the three stories have a canine motif and are connected by a horrendous car accident; you can comment that’s the only bond between the threes.

The movie is pessimist; the ending of Amores Perros is depressing: no one really comes out as the winner and everybody's hopes are banished. The end shots of all the three stories are breathtaking. Octavio’s (acted by Garcia Barnal) futile wait in bus stop for his sister-in-law, Valeria (the model) in the wheel chair with her amputated leg verifies her poster in the billboard (again a futile attempt, the billboard says “disponible” means space-available), El Chivo (the revolutionary) records his last statements for his daughter, but the recorder stops before he can remark “I love you, my little girl”.

Out of the three narrations, my ballot walks off for the second story, involving the businessman and the model. Their love dies unborn, the sufferings and distresses are metaphoric with their lost dog.

Though the ambiance of the movie as a whole is grim and unpleasant; the kinetic technique of Amores Perros is dazzlingly remarkable. It is a vibrant demonstration of pure filmmaking styles: many of the sequences were edited for more than thirty times, even the screenplay was tailored with thirty six drafts in beginning!

You might feel repulsive about Amores Perros due to the rough gloomy gory detail of human life. However, that is the movie’s premier asset.

Love, as the title designated, does not triumph.

Amores Perros
(Love is a Bitch - 2000)
Directed By : Alejandro González Iñárritu