Mexico Bites: How Style & Structure in Amores Perros Leads to Its Success

In January of 2001, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu described his film Amores Perros (2001) to a reporter from Variety as "a movie about pain, love and redemption - and about Mexico City, where I've lived all my life. The city is a very complex, contradictory mosaic that's fascinating and electric and ugly and painful all at once" (Swart).

The following will argue that, even with little knowledge of the D.F. (Distrito Federal, or Capital City, as it is known in Mexico) beyond its sheer size (nearly nine million inhabitants), the form of Amores Perros-its style, structure and narrative-clearly illustrates the complexities of the city, but also makes the film ripe for international success. In addition, it becomes a clear spearhead for the resurgence of a Mexican national cinema.

From a screenplay by novelist Guillermo Arriaga, comes Gonzalez Iñárritu's first feature film, one that "channels two men-the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and Quentin Tarantino" (Smith). It is a narrative, structured much like Tarantino's now famous Pulp Fiction (1994), in three parts-"Octavio & Susana", "Daniel and Valeria", and finally "El Chivo and Maru", all of which hinge on a central brutal car case and eventual crash, shown as a sort of prologue to the film.

"Octavio & Susana" is the story of a young man (the fugitive from the prologue, played by Gael Garcia Bernal) who is hopelessly in love with his beautiful young sister-in-law, Susana, who lives in the same apartment. After much coercing, Octavio seems to convince her to leave his abusive brother (her husband) and run away with him "to the North." But he needs money to get away and to provide for her. When Cofi- Octavio's domestic rottweiler who has briefly run away from home- kills a prized dogfight champion in the streets, Octavio is forced into the underground illegal world of dog fighting himself. As Cofi continues to fight (and win), however, Octavio finds himself amassing quite a little fortune, enough to buy his own car and to live with Susana (Vanessa Bauche) "for two years." Everything seems to be going right (the two are sleeping together daily, while Octavio's brother is at work, and Octavio even goes so far as to hire goons to assault his brother after he hits Susana), until one of his rivals shoots Cofi mid-fight, leading to the aforementioned chase. Which is seen this time in the narrative's present-tense, rather than as a flashback.

The second segment of the story, entitled "Daniel and Valeria", takes over from here. Intersecting, so to speak, with the previous storyline when it is revealed that Valeria (Goya Toledo) is trapped in the car into which Octavio collides. It is the story of Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero), a successful middle-aged magazine publisher, who leaves his wife and family to live in a new apartment with supermodel/actress Valeria. It is on their first night together in a new apartment that she goes out on an errand and her car is hit at the crossroads by Octavio. She survives her terrible injuries, but later has to have her leg amputated due to complications (gangrene) resulting from trying to free her dog Richie, who has become trapped in a hole in the floor of the apartment. Thus, the crash ends her modeling career and forces Daniel into a life of service to his now wheelchair-bound mistress.

Part three, "El Chivo and Mura," focuses on the character of an old, ex-revolutionary, seen briefly in the first two episodes. El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), or "the Goat" in Spanish (presumably because he wears, for most of the film, a very shaggy beard), is a wandering street person who cares for a heard of stray dogs and works for a corrupt cop as an assassin for hire. Assigned to assassinate the business partner and brother-in-law of his new wealthy client, the story is an eerie upper-class reflection of Octavio's plight. El Chivo happens to be at the intersection when the fateful accident occurs and saves the badly wounded Cofi, whom he nurses back to health.

Seen throughout the film observing his now adult daughter Mura, whom he left behind twenty years earlier for a life of political rebellion, the film ends with El Chivo cutting his long hair and fingernails, shaving his beard and donning his old intellectual look once again (even though his glasses are badly scratched and held together by tape). He breaks into his daughter's obviously upper-middleclass penthouse to leave her money, a picture of himself and a message on an answering machine, just before the final images of El Chivo walking along the Desierto de los Leones (a desert-like area just outside of the city's limits) roll across the screen.

With a barrage of Tarantino-like images of blood and carnage present from the very beginning of the film, it is no wonder that reportedly nearly one-quarter of the movie's Mexican audience walked out of the theaters (Schaeffer 90). However, the captivating nature of the film's form goes well beyond the blood of dogfights and car accidents. Gonzalez Iñárritu himself described the opportunity he saw in the film as "cierto ritmo editorial... donde sostener el interes del auditorio solo podria lograrse a traves de un dominio del ritmo y de sus diferentes tonos" ("a certain rhythm of editing... where the only way to keep the interest of the audience is by using an overpowering beat with a variety of tones"; Schaeffer 88). All images of blood & gore aside, however, Gonzalez Iñárritu's rhythm and style of editing and camera work is a barrage on the senses itself. As Claudia Schaeffer, Professor of Spanish at the University of Rochester, explains in a chapter on Amores Perros in her book Bored to Distraction: Cinema of Excess in End-of-the-Century Mexico and Spain, "the director's camera never pauses to allow us to breathe a sigh of relief. Rather than the predictable rhythms of labor and leisure, its speed is breakneck, the stories jump-cut into one another, any narrative closure is absent in favor of the immediacy of the audience's complete emotional engagement" (Schaeffer 88-89).

The film-which itself runs over two-and-a-half hours-with its dizzyingly bright colors, jam packed mise-en-scene, and ceaseless motion of absolutely every frame, leaves the audience feeling completely exhausted at its conclusion. Schaeffer likens this to "a kind of visual Freudian repetition compulsion" (Schaeffer 89). Amores Perros is a film that, "returns to unresolved traumas again and again. Its aim is not to overcome them but just the opposite: to make us unable to live without seeing them. The 'cohabitation' of three tales in one film recreates the pressures of urban life, the feeling that one is never alone but always exiting one scene to enter the next. The leftovers of previous scenarios and situations hang on and we cling to what we have already experienced, perhaps with the hope of finally making sense of it all" (Schaeffer 89).

Unlike many of its Hollywood counterparts, Amores Perros has no happy ending, no nicely packaged conclusions, but there is no complete disaster either. Quite simply, "the momentum, the rhythm, of what we see onscreen appears to continue beyond the credits, whether we like it or not... things do not begin or end with our presence, and they neither get better nor go away" (Schaeffer 90). There is no clear-cut beginning or end to the narrative we see before us. We, the audience, are merely witnesses, catching a glimpse into the ongoing lives of those we see before us on the screen.

Presumably, the lives of the characters from each of the three sections never cross paths with those of another section, but a close look at the narrative reveals, "the interweaving of lives and itineraries in ways that belie the cliché of urban fragmentation" (D'Lugo 224). The style and structure of the film illuminates a city which is "characterized by the continuous juxtapositions between the modern and primitive, between a glamorous world of televisual images and the leitmotifs of animalistic violence" (D'Lugo 224). It is after all, a Mexico City of bright lights; of cell phones & pagers; of fast cars and Walkmans. But it is also a Mexico City of dog fights, assassinations and domestic violence.

Amores Perros,the screenplay, conjures up images of Spanish director Luis Buñuel. From his 1970 film Tristana, whose leading lady suffers from an amputated leg, just as Valeria does, to the 1950 Los Olvidados, with an air of urban violence and a gang of youths similar to that seen chasing Octavio in the film's prologue. But more to the point, each of these films (Tristana, Los Olvidados, and even Amores Perros) "was set at a precise historical moment and addressed its theme from within the specificity of that society" (D'Lugo 222). For a Mexico who had, up until a few weeks after Amores Perros was released internationally, been suffering under the rule of a corrupt political machine since 1968, and a not unrelated increase in urban violence, "Gonzalez Iñárritu's film speaks in similarly culturally-specific ways of the contradictions of contemporary urban life at the end of the century. Importantly, it manages to do this in ways that also engage non-Mexican audiences" (D'Lugo 222).

Given this fact, it is not difficult to understand why the film has garnered such success-it was the top domestic earner of 2000 (Tsao 12)-and critical acclaim-having won the Ariel, the main national film award in Mexico, as well as being nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film and winning awards at festivals in Cannes, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Havana, Chicago, Sao Paulo, and Edinburgh (D'Lugo 221)-and is thus at the forefront (along with films like Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien; 2001) of a revival in Mexican National Cinema[1].

The film, which also features a musical soundtrack of pulsating, in-your-face, rock and hip hop tracks, "immerses the audience in an almost-unbroken stream of intense emotional experiences that assault the eye, leading many reviewers in the United States to use language such as 'harrowing' and 'raw' to refer to its relentlessly focused camera work" (Schaeffer 84). It is these emotional experiences and the "raw" camera work that is at the root of the film's international success. Amores Perros is shot in such a manner that, along with an emotionally intense narrative, it draws an audience to the edge of their seats, regardless of the language the actors are speaking in: a feat rare among U.S. mass audiences viewing foreign films.

The Mexico City of Amores Perros "is a space readily understood by audiences through the images of violence, a mise-en-scene that is both exotic and familiar to the non-Mexican audience by virtue of the global stylistics of violence in the media" (D'Lugo 227-28). It can thus be understood that the "devastating portrait of visceral violence and fatalism becomes the privileged image of Mexico that most successfully travels abroad" (D'Lugo 229).

For its U.S. premiere, Lions Gate[2] translated (actually incorrectly[3]) the film's title to mean "Love's a Bitch". However, this may be in fact still fitting, since the film, "finds its emotional core in its characters' close relationships with their dogs" (Smith). As Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu told Time Magazine, "It's very simple: you get to know people through their dogs" (Schickel). For much of the film, Octavio's relationship with Cofi is good-natured but nonchalant. That is, until the dog is shot. It is here that Octavio, suddenly enraged, stabs the assailant and is pursued into his near fatal accident, "as maddened by the threat to Cofi as he is by his lover's hesitations and ambiguities" (Schickel).

Next take Valeria. "She's as fluffy and self-absorbed as her tiny dog Richie. She cannot endure the pain, loneliness and loss that follow the accident. He becomes similarly needy as a result of a mishap that is, at first, more comic than desperate" (Schickel).

Finally, we have the relationship of El Chivo to his dogs. Happening, seemingly for no reason, past as the accident happens; he first picks the pockets of the two unconscious men in the car, and then scoops up the badly wounded Cofi, adding him to his mangy flock. When the dog, reverting to instinct, kills all El Chivo's other strays while he is out one afternoon, El Chivo is left devastated, not knowing what to do.

Except this time, "unlike Octavio and Valeria, El Chivo is shrewd enough to recognize something of himself in the killer dog, and to begin to make peace with his haunted past" (Schickel). It may be too late for any full-scale reconciliation on the part of El Chivo, but he is willing to try. Unlike his counterparts, Octavio and Valeria, he realizes what has become of himself and appears to want to begin anew. "His is the only hopeful story Iñárritu tells, the one that catches this aspect of his belief: 'We lose our innocence, our looks, our loves, finally life itself. We are what we lose'" (Schickel).

One would have to go back nearly a decade before the film's release to find a Mexican film (Alfonso Arau's Como Agua Para Chocolate, Like Water for Chocolate; 1992) that has done so well, both commercially and critically, not only in Mexico but on an international stage. Unlike Arau's film, though, the Mexico City of Amores Perros is not nearly as clichéd a Mexico for tourists. Still, we see depicted a city which, beneath a shroud of modern technology, "reinforces certain impressions that the outside world has of a violent Mexican culture" (D'Lugo 221).

Through the structure of the screenplay from Guillermo Arriaga, and the style of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu's camera work and editing, comes not only a truly complex vision of the D.F. for audiences at home and abroad, but a film poised for lasting international success; a film worthy of leading the pack for the resurgence of a Mexican national cinema.

WORKS CITIED:

Amores Perros. Dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Perf. Emilio Echevarría, Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Álvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche. 2000. DVD Lions Gate, 2001

D'Lugo, Marvin. "Amores Perros: Love's a Bitch." The Cinema of Latin America. Edited by: Elena, Alberto and Marina Diaz Lopez. Chap. 23. New York: 2003

Schaeffer, Claudia. Bored to Distraction: Cinema of Excess in End-of-the-Century Mexico and Spain. New York: SUNY Press, 2003 Schickel, Richard. "A Bite As Tough As Its Bark: Dogs are humans' best friends in the superb Amores Perros." Time Magazine 8 April 2001. 11 December 2006

Smith, Christopher. "Love's a Bitch." Week in Rewind.com. 11 December 2006

Swart, Sharon. "Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu: Helmer gets raw with 'Amores Perros'" Variety. 11 December 2006

Tsao, Leonardo Garcia. "After the Breakthrough of Amores Perros, what's next for Mexican Cinema?" Film Comment vol. 37 #4 (2001): 11-13

[1] In 1998, only 11 features were made in Mexico, the smallest number since the early 1930s. However, in 2000, there were 28 features made and the number was expected to reach the mid-30s in 2001 (the last year of statistics I had). In addition - in 2000, earnings by local releases made up 17% of the box-office gross, a staggering number for domestic films in the country (Tsao 11).

[2]Lions Gate Films is the U.S. Distributor of the film, which was produced in Mexico by AltaVista Films and Zeta Films.

[3] "In Spanish, using 'perro', a noun, as an adjective, suggests the instinctual, animal nature of their obsessions" (D'Lugo 225).