With its handheld-camera work, helter-skelter editing style and red-hot emotions that seem always on the verge of erupting, "Daniel and Susanna" delivers an in-your-face intensity that proves as compulsive as it is abhorrent. The movie's first and third episodes are the strongest, thanks to their thematically rich plotlines and the psychological conflicts to which they give rise. In fact, the opposite is true: It is the dogs who reflect the attitudes and actions of their owners.
"Masters take after their dogs," Chivo tells a man he has been hired to kill. Violence and cruelty are accepted aspects of everyday life, and few of the characters show any guilt over the pain they inflict upon others. This is a difficult film to watch, not only because of the dogfighting sequences (accomplished through deft camera work and editing, as well as the power of suggestion) but also because of the total disregard for life - human and canine - that suffuses the film. His life is irrevocably changed when he witnesses the collision and rescues the injured rottweiler. "El Chivo and Maru," the final chapter, focuses on a political revolutionary-turned-hired killer (Emilio Echevarría), who shuns society but showers affection on his four beloved dogs.
Their lives unravel in the second segment, "Daniel and Valeria," when the supermodel must cope with the loss of her physical perfection.
The driver of that second vehicle is Valeria (Goya Toledo), a beautiful fashion model who has just set up housekeeping with her boyfriend, a married businessman who has left his family for her. During the opening scene's high-speed chase, Octavio's automobile spins out of control, plowing into another vehicle. The level of human violence and destruction parallels that of the dogs in the ring.
To earn the money needed to run away with her, he enters his rottweiler, Cofi, in a series of fights. Teenage Octavio (Gael García Bernal) is in love with the wife of his volatile and abusive older brother. The first segment, "Octavio and Susanna," is set in the vicious underground world of dogfighting (dogs figure prominently in all three stories). Structured as a triptych, the film, set in Mexico City, concerns the lives of three disparate characters whose fates intersect when each is involved in the catastrophic car accident that opens the film. One of this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, Amores Perros is a film of raw power and crippling brutality that exposes viewers to a world drenched in grime, sweat, greed and, finally, unexpectedly, the barest glimmer of hope and grace.Ī stunning achievement thematically, emotionally and artistically, the film's visceral impact comes as much from the bold, scabrous images that dominate the screen as from the grim, hellish circumstances in which the characters find themselves. He has succeeded beyond perhaps even his wildest dreams.
"I wanted to make a movie that smelled of filth," Alejandro González Iñárritu has said about his feature-directorial debut. One doesn't watch Amores Perros ( Love's a Bitch) so much as absorb it - like a body blow.