Somehow, in the seven years since its release date, Love's a Bitch (its international title) has escaped my viewing pleasure until this summer. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's gritty, fast paced Mexican drama received critical acclaim at the time of it's release, including an Academy award nomination for Best Foreign language film in 2001. I think that it meets the criteria for another review; after all, it is a foreign film and far less popular and accessible than Inarritu's recent film, Babel. Written by Guillermo Arriaga Jordan, Amores Perro depicts three people, strangers to each other, living in Mexico City. He braids their lives together throughout the film, creating a very real, more than slightly disturbing look at urban life and love.
Gael Garcia Bernal plays Octavio, a young man looking for extra money and helplessly in love with his brother's wife. His aggressive dog, Cofi, proves his strength and stamina on the street and soon Octavio finds himself in the underworld of dogfighting. The cinematography and sense of immediacy present in the filming is so great that, as I watched the dogs destroy each other during the fights, I was so disturbed I wanted to cover my puppy, Eowyn's, ears.
Actress Goya Toledo deftly plays supermodel Valeria, who is immobilized by a life shattering car accident. She's is horrified to find that her own dog, Richie, is lost somewhere in her apartment beneath the floorboards. The dog's endless, pathetic scratching from below emphasizes Valeria's own desperate solitude, her immobile condition, and the slow painful disintegration of her relationship with her lover. It's as if the director was trying to symbolize the ineffable feeling of a subtly poisoned relationship.
Emilio Echevarrķa does an absolute bang up job as ex-guerrilla turned assassin, El Chiva. He is both mournful and frightening in his attempt to reconcile who he is now with who he was - or would like to be. El Chiva takes in a stray dog after a car accident, and the dog's behavior forces him to confront his own nature.
Beautiful, moving, realistic performances drew me further and further into the dark underbelly of urban Mexico City and forced me to look at the desperate parts of my own nature. The driving forces behind the choices of these three characters are common to every single one of us: the desire to succeed and the longing for something better. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu uses the metaphors of the dogs to show us how those very desires can tear us apart or transform us if we let them.
Somehow, in the seven years since its release date, Love's a Bitch (its international title) has escaped my viewing pleasure until this summer. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's gritty, fast paced Mexican drama received critical acclaim at the time of it's release, including an Academy award nomination for Best Foreign language film in 2001. I think that it meets the criteria for another review; after all, it is a foreign film and far less popular and accessible than Inarritu's recent film, Babel. Written by Guillermo Arriaga Jordan, Amores Perro depicts three people, strangers to each other, living in Mexico City. He braids their lives together throughout the film, creating a very real, more than slightly disturbing look at urban life and love.
