Scripted
by Guillermo Arriaga Jordan,
and set against a backdrop of the urban horrors of Mexico
City, Amores Perros, the debut from 37-year-old
Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu,
is a movie with big thematic ambitions, built around the
tragic impact that a car crash in Mexico has on the lives
it touches.
What
the characters have in common is the fact that they are
the victims of a brutal, animal love. Teenager Octavio
(Gael Garcia Bernal) has decided to run away with Susana
(debutante Vanessa Bauche), his brother's wife. Forty-two-year-old
Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero) has left his wife and children
to set up home with model Valeria (lens-friendly Spanish
actress Goya Toledo), who is involved in the accident.
El Chivo (Emilio EcheverrÌa), an ex-communist guerrilla,
who has spent
much time in jail and who is now a contract killer, happens
upon the scene of the wreck, where he steals Susana's
dog, thus opening the way to a slow process of redemption.
Iñárritu
cut his broadcasting teeth in the mid-1980s, working on
Mexico's prime rock radio station, WFM. After writing the
music for several projects and setting up Zeta Film in 1991,
his first directing work was in the medium-length TV feature
After The Money, starring Spanish heartthrob Miguel
Bosé. The
director describes Amores as "a film made not with the heart,
but with the guts, about how we all are and, equally, what
we have lost." It is thus more
than simply a film about the emotions, about human vulnerability
and redemption, but also a take on the time-honoured theme
of death as social leveller, with more than a hint of social
criticism thrown in.
Amores Perros and Todo El Poder
(All The Power) are the two Mexican projects to which
Lions Gate picked up the international rights, excluding
Latin America, at the end of April, and company president
Joe Drake claims he is confident they will be well received
at Cannes.
Buzz
says that the film is a visual treat, with Mexico City getting
a more in-your-face, gritty realist treatment than ever
before,
courtesy of cameraman Rodrigo Prieto, with each of the protagonists
imposing their own vision of the city onto the film.
It
remains to be seen who gets the prize for the most memorably
lensed Mexico this Cannes: Iñárritu or Arturo
Ripstein for Such Is Life.
Jonathan
Holland
