There's slum kid Octavio (Bernal), who, with a friend, enters his hulking rottweiler Cofi in the local dog fights and eventually wins (and loses) everything. (The title made me think of Dominique Deruddere's 1987 Bukowski adapation L'Amour est un Chien de L'Enfer - Love Is a Dog From Hell - a far more accurate titling for Iñárritu's film, but what can you do?) Like Soderbergh's recent film and Tarantino's older one, Amores Perros interlaces three distinct tales around a single event, in this case a horrific traffic accident, and then plays fast and loose with structure and narrative to fill in the befores and afters. And still it has a bloody-but-unbowed corazón d'amor at its core. A violent triptych of meditations on the futility of redemption in a world spun out of control (in this case, modern-day Mexico City), Amores Perros takes no prisoners, or perhaps just shoots them in the heart when your eye is elsewhere engaged. Like a couple of other powerful debuts from the last decade (I'm thinking of American Beauty and Reservoir Dogs), its dark, almost surrealist tone escalates it high above the usual gory gunfare and marks it as a film to be reckoned with.
An absolutely astonishing film from 37-year-old Mexican director Iñárritu, Amores Perros packs a complex emotional wallop that rivals the recent Traffic or Tarantino's Pulp Fiction - the fact that it's Inarritu's first film makes it even more remarkable.
If Amores Perros - loosely translated as Love's a Bitch - doesn't shake you up, then baby, you're already dead.
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