Review: Amores Perros
It didn't look as though Cannes was going to have a true controversy this year, or even any film about which to get really hot under the collar. One, however, has turned up in the nick of time, although it is unaccompanied by any press furore, largely because it is hidden away in the small but selective Critics' Week. That's the rather scrappily publicised section that most people get to explore only after they've trawled the Competition, the variable Un Certain Regard section and the Directors' Fortnight - the festival's most public-friendly chunk.
This year's Critics Week hit so far is a Mexican film - Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's debut feature Amores Perros (it could be translated as Dog Love, although the press release goes for Love's A Bitch). It's a film of extreme violence, among both humans and dogs. The first third is set in the sordid, blood-steeped dog-fighting rings of low-life Mexico City, where slavering, snapping hounds hurl themselves at each other in ear-ripping combat. Even though the shots of the dog-fights are mercifully brief and ungloating, they are enough to unsettle you even if you're no dog lover (and after a week trying not to step on the micro-chihuahuas on the Croisette, festival-goers tend not to be).
The dogs form a parallel to human life on the streets of Mexico City, where people all too easily revert to teeth-baring rage. This isn't just a facile dog-eat-dog parable: the canine theme is a cleverly worked-out device for knitting together three stories that intersect in the car crash that starts the film.
In story one, set at the bottom of the poverty ladder, a teenage mother is courted by her hoodlum husband's kid brother. Hoping to buy them a better life, he enters his dog in fights, where it proves to be the bloodiest battler around. In the second story, a model moves into a luxury flat with her middle-aged married lover, but things go horribly wrong when her pampered pooch disappears under the floorboards. And finally, a dog-loving terrorist turned tramp and hitman prepares for his latest mission.
Even at two hours, 33 minutes, there's barely a moment wasted. Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga Jordan are dazzlingly adept storytellers; they've managed to shoehorn three genres coherently into one film.
The first story is hard, low-life realism, shot in lurid colours and edited as a frenetic blur. The model's section is a cruel moral tale of the unexpected, with the tension cranked up mercilessly throughout; it is photographed as a picture of a smooth, upmarket world in which the real troubles go on beneath the surface (under the floorboards, in fact). The third story is pitched as a suspenseful psychological thriller.
The whole is composed according to the Pulp Fiction principle of interlocking lives, all the while looping back and forth in time. Just occasionally you feel the contrivance, but there's never any sense that this is a film wrapped up in its own tentacles or just fiddling around with fancy plot diagrams, like Run Lola Run. It never loses the feel of the everyday. In the dogfights especially, Gonzalez Inarritu could almost be making an edgy, rap-rhythmed documentary, photographed by Rodrigo Prieto so that you can feel the grease, the grime and the panic.
The dog fights mean that the film-makers are in for a hairy time trying to get the film shown in Britain, where the British Board of Film Classification comes down hard on any hint of cruelty to animals. One film that was unreleasable here for that very reason was Claire Denis's film about cockfighting, S'En Fout La Mort, which can be seen at the NFT next month. The fact that Denis's was a sombre art film with a semi-documentary edge could have been regarded as a mitigating factor. It would be harder to argue that case for Amores Perros, which, despite its authentic-looking realism, also has a high-thrills factor. The movie-makers claim that no dogs were hurt during filming, although it's hard to imagine quite how they managed that. The film includes real fighting dogs and, from the look of it, real owners too, every bit as plug-ugly as their pets.
For all its sensationalism, however, this is also a very moral film, with all its characters inexorably heading towards the fates they bring upon themselves - it's a brilliant portrait of the dog beneath the human skin. Amores Perros may also turn out to be the most exciting blast of pure narrative in Cannes this year. It certainly made you look twice at all the trembling Fifis and Fidos on the Croisette.
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