Contemporary Latin American Cinema Cycle, Tyneside Cinema, Amores Perrosintroduction, 4th June, Dr Ann Davies (Hispanic cinema specialist, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University)
It’s hard to overestimate the significance of Amores perros for the Latin American film industry. Amores perros is not the first foreign language film to demonstrate a capacity for slick and fast filmmaking on a par with high-level Hollywood products. But it blazed a trail of critical and commercial success as far as Latin America was concerned. Mexicans were proud to discover that their cinema could be internationally successful, following the fortunes of Amores perros with an interest not far off any national football match.
Yet for all the national pride in the film, it’s hard to find in the film any sense that we’re in Mexico City as opposed to Los Angeles or New York. We could be anywhere. And in many ways the different stories that make up the film are taking place everywhere: the young lad trying to make something of his life with extra cash and the girl of his dreams; the middle-aged executive who finds his dream of a new life with a younger woman turns sour; the disillusionment and cynicism of a man who earlier hoped to change the world. And yet, while the sense of world-weariness and political apathy that the film induces seems generic to the Western world, as many a politician laments, in some ways it is particularly about Mexico, too. By the time of the release of Amores perros Mexico had experienced 80 years of government by the same ruling party. If Mexicans took pride in the film, they may have been less happy about the portrait of modern Mexico it offers to international audiences like us: a decadent society in which people fight each other just as the dogs of the film do.
The director of Amores perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu, refuses to be trapped in a ghetto of specifically Mexican film. His next film was 21 Grams, an excellent and complex film with a similar structure of interweaving stories to Amores Perros, but filmed in English and with English-language stars such as Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. His latest film,Babel uses the Mexican star of Amores perros, Gael García Bernal, alongside Brad Pitt and Kate Blanchett, and is shot in four different languages. This refusal to stay home is shared by other major names in Mexican cinema. Guillermo del Toro who makes subtle Spanish-language horror such as The Devil’s Backbone and Cronos but also comic book blockbusters in English such as Blade 2 and Hellboy. Alfonso Cuarón, who made the other major Mexican hit Y tu mama también, has also made the third in the Harry Potter film series, visiting Alnwick Castle in the North-East to do so.
What particularly distinguishes González Iñárritu’s films are his use of intertwined but distinct stories, so that the characters in his films crisscross each other’s lives without being necessarily aware that they do so, suggesting an inability to communicate even in an era where complex communication technologies abound. In Amores perros the central characters of each segment never know those of the other segments, and yet they impinge on each other in the most dramatic way possible, through one of the most effective car crashes in cinematic history (and there have been quite a few, after all). The only form of communication that seems effective is the capacity to hurt and betray. And this is where the title of the film comes in. The title of the film is usually left untranslated (though sometimes the translation Love’s a bitch will be offered), but the word perros of the title has a double meaning. Perro is Spanish for dog, and dogs do indeed play a central role in the film, becoming characters in their own right. Since this film contains plenty of blood and violence, a reassuring credit is provided at the end to the effect that no animals were harmed in the making of the film. But perro has another meaning, wretched or rotten, and this is the meaning that applies to the people in the film. Given the suffering and ill-treatment endured by many of the characters, through their own fault or that of others, it might have helped to have had another credit that said no people were harmed in the course of making the film. For the harrowing pain of the people in this film looks very, very real – we must work hard to remember that these are, after all, actors.
Related links:
Internet Movie Database, visited by 38 million movie lovers a month, a wealth of information on film at your fingertips:
www.imdb.com
Dr Ann Davies staff webpage, more on her research interests and publications:www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/staff/profile/ann.davies
Interview with González Iñárritu on indiewire:http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Alejand_Gonzal_010330.html