AMORES PERROS
(Loves a Bitch)

About The Story

Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch) is a bold, intensely emotional and ambitious story of lives that collide in a Mexico City car crash. Inventively structured as a triptych of overlapping and intersecting narratives, Amores Perros explores the lives of desperate characters who are catapulted into unforeseen dramatic situations instigated by the seemingly inconsequential destiny of a dog called Cofi. In "Octavio and Susana", Cofi's teenage owner enters his dog into the brutal world of dog fighting to raise money for his elopement with his brother's young and appealing wife. Cofi's near-fatal injury prompts a reckless car chase that ends abruptly and violently. In "Daniel and Valeria", a middle-aged business man discovers that dreams can become nightmares after he abandons his family to set up home with a beautiful young model who is tragically transformed by the crash. Finally, in "El Chivo and Maru", a revolutionary-turned-assassin witnesses the accident and finds that it leads him to an unexpected and life-altering moral epiphany. A powerful and profound story of love, loss, retribution and redemption, Amores Perros raises provocative questions about the human condition at the same time that the film daringly recapitulates and reinvents different styles of Latin cinema. The result is a vivid and intricate mosaic of classic themes rendered in original and unforgettable ways.

About The Film

A boldly conceived and intricately plotted drama, Amores Perros has already been hailed by the New York Times as, "The first classic of the new decade". Ever since it's acclaimed and award-winning world premiere at Cannes, this directorial debut by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has become a sensation on the International Film Festival circuit, where it has been praised as a film of outstanding power, originality and raw beauty. It has also won a stunning array of prizes from both juries and audiences alike, proclaiming not only it's impressive artistic achievements, but also it's undeniable and visceral power to excite people in new and unexpected ways. A Lions Gate Films release of an Altavista production, Amores Perros was produced and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by noted Mexican novelist Guillermo Arriaga. Starring Emillio Echevarria, one of Mexico's most acclaimed actors, in the pivotal role of El Chivo, the film features a stunning ensemble cast, including Gael Garcia Bernal, Vanessa Bauche, Alvaro Guerrero, Goya Toledo and Jorge Salinas.

Alejandro González Iñárritu sets his visionary tale in Mexico City, a place he describes as, "an anthropological experiment. I'm one of the twenty-one million people who live in the world's largest and most populated city, a city with inordinately high rates of pollution, violence and corruption", he observes. "However, as incredible and paradoxical as it may sound, Mexico City is beautiful and fascinating. Amores Perros is a product of this contradiction, a reflection of the baroque and complex mosaic that is Mexico City and, ultimately, life itself". As González Iñárritu notes, violence is an integral part of his mosaic. The film alternates moments of brutality with sequences of beauty and poetry. Amores Perros defiantly goes against the grain of the sort of contemporary cinema that glamorises criminal behaviour and presents killers as either hip or heroic, with quirky 'alternative' moral codes. Though on the surface the film covers some of the same territory, exploring the lives of men and women who routinely break the rules (including a hit man), the film does not celebrate violence as being glamorous or seductive. Instead, Amores Perros is a sensitive, probing, and intensely moral portrait of human behaviour in which violence has meaning and consequences. Often Biblical in it's approach to story telling, the movie suggests that there is a moment of reckoning in every life and that the age-old "Thou Shalt Not" commandments are still important. "We try to show that violence has consequences", González Iñárritu explains. "When you create violence, it turns against you".

The dog fights that dominate the first part of Amores Perros bring these Biblical themes to life in a disturbing, but ultimately enlightening, way. There are a million stray dogs in Mexico City. Acknowledging that these dogs are an important part of the contemporary Mexican landscape, González Iñárritu places them at the very centre of his story. Inextricably linked to the characters and their fates, the dogs serve as important symbols throughout the film. Innocent victims of a never-ending cycle of violence, they are moulded by their masters, reflecting their aggression and amorality in a world that is literally dog-eat-dog. "The dogfight is a cruel reality", González Iñárritu observes, "but more than the fights, we were interested in the relationships between the dogs and the people. What happens to the characters, happens to their dogs". González Iñárritu knows that the scenes involving dogs and dogfights in Amores Perros have the ability to provoke extreme reactions in audiences. One of the observations he makes about his film, and about life itself, is that people often have better relationships with their dogs than they do with other human beings. Gonzalez sees this as an indication that man is losing his humanity. "I think it is scary that we care more for animals than humans. We can see a homeless man and a homeless dog, and we care first for the dog. This is what the character El Chivo does in the film - he saves Octavio's dog rather than Octavio".

González Iñárritu finds it impossible to imagine Amores Perros without dogs. No other animal could have had the same impact or meaning in the film. "We use dogs in this film because I believe they are the closest to us in nature", he says. "Dogs can be loyal, faithful, humble, gentle and generous, but at the same time, they can kill if threatened. Actually, our animal nature is worse than theirs because we kill for money, ambition and power, while dogs only kill to survive". It is important to note that González Iñárritu constructs his amazingly realistic scenes of canine savagery through artful and careful filmmaking. He was scrupulous about not harming any animals during the making of Amores Perros. He explains that, "the illusion of animal brutality was created in the shooting and editing, the same way I avoided hurting any humans in the scenes involving the car crash. The dogs were wearing plastic muzzles - clearly visible in freeze frames - and the dogs who appear dead and bloodied were wearing makeup and were sedated. The film's animal trainer is very respected in animal welfare circles and he used his own dogs, so he genuinely cared about them".

Iñárritu appreciated the complexity and power of Amores Perros the very first time he read Guillermo Arriaga's script. "When I read Guillermo Arriaga's first draft (we worked on 36 over the three years) it moved and disturbed me. I could see and feel the characters and I could feel something profoundly human about them. It was as if they stepped off the paper and stood before me, suffering", he recalls. As a result, Amores Perros radiates unique passion , originality and humanity. A highly respected novelist, Arriaga wanted his script to be a declaration of principles in a world that is often considered wayward and immoral. "I wanted to write a script that didn't trivialise violence and death - that made the reader feel the tremendous weight of a murder, the frightful consequences of a car accident, the reasons behind betrayal, the tragic momentum of illicit love", he says. "I wanted my script to convey the pain, confusion, sadness, joy, ruin and hope of life itself. Most of all, I wanted it to be fiercely human". Unafraid to explore new frontiers in storytelling, Amores Perros presents a bold and often daring vision of the human condition. This was Arriaga's mission. "I wanted to write a script that was free from the disgusting tyranny of the political correctness - that gross softening of human experience through an outdated and cowardly morality", he says. "my characters descend into their own Hell and, after bouncing fiercely between what is right and what is wrong, find the path towards a reconciliation within themselves. I wanted the characters to live intensely and pay the price for it".

Gonzalez Inarritu's audacious and ambitious style of filmmaking matches Arragia's story and brings it to life in ingenious and masterful ways. In fact, Inarritu pays homage to several different styles of Latin cinema in Amores Perros. "Octavio and Susanna", the first story in the tryptich, invokes the gritty poverty of socially conscious, realistic dramas. "Daniel and Valeria", the second story, exists on a more metaphorical plane, evoking a cosmopolitan and literary tradition. The final chapter, "El Chivo and Maru", reaches for an almost surreal power, using a Cain and Able-like parable to convey a sweeping world view. By recapitulating and reinventing the various kinds of movies his culture has produced, Gonzalez Inarritu creates his own new version of Mexican cinema. Central to his pioneering vision, Gonzalez Inarritu had definite ideas about the camera work of Amores Perros and relied on Director of Photography Rodrigo Prieto to design a unique and expressive look for the film. "I wanted the camera to be a silent but proactive witness of real facts taking place before our eyes", says Inarritu.

What The Critics Said

"the thing that makes this near perfect bit of filmmaking less than perfect is the second segment - the story of a model injured in the car crash who loses her dog - which drags on rather too long and drains the energy of the picture. Still, it's a superb piece of cinema and the flaws only serve to highlight how good the rest of it is."
Wendy Ide, UNCUT.

"Tough, truthful and free of plot gristle, Alejandro González Iñárritu feature debut is at once brutally commanding and red-raw with compassion. As ragged as the emotions are here, its tales of the city cut across Mexican society without stumbling once - if you can stomach the dog fights, it's a must-see.
Kevin Harley, TOTAL FILM

Cast

 

El Chivo		EMILIO ECHEVARRIA
Octavio		GAEL GARCIA BERNAL
Valeria		GOYA TOLEDO
Daniel		ALVERO GUERRERO
Susana		VANESSA BAUCHE
Luis		JORGE SALINAS
Ramiro		MARCO PEREZ
Gustavo		RODRIGO MURRAY
Jorge		HUMBERTO BUSTO
Mauricio		GERARDO CAMPBELL
Tia Luisa		ROSA MARIA BIANCHI