Review: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros on the Criterion Collection

Iñárritu’s sprawling, kinetic debut feature gets a solid HD transfer and a generous heaping of varied extras.

Amores PerrosAlejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros opens with a series of blurry, disorienting traveling shots of Mexico City and fast-approaching cars seen through the side and back windows of a speeding car. A character from off screen yells, “What have you done?”—a question that hangs over much of the film but which, in these first few chaotic minutes, seems almost immaterial as we soon learn that the two men in the car, Octavio (Gael García Bernal) and Jorge (Humberto Busto), are being pursued by armed thugs and have a bleeding dog lying in their back seat. Survival is all that matters in this moment and in the nonlinear triptych of stories that are interwoven throughout, odysseys of temptation and betrayal that find Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga presenting Mexico City as rife with violence, misogyny, and poverty.

Released just as the 71-year-long reign of the corrupt PRI party came to an end in Mexico, Amores Perros arrived at a critical moment in the history of Iñárritu’s homeland. And it both played a major role in reviving a national film industry that released a mere eight features just two years prior and, unfortunately, portended the rapid downfall of a nation that would occur over the decade following its release. Amores Perros’s pivotal event, after all, is a fatal accident that serves as the connective tissue between its three narrative strands: one in which Octavio falls in love with his sister-in-law, Susana (Vanessa Bauche); another in which the wealthy Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero) leaves his wife and children for his model girlfriend, Valeria (Goya Toledo); and one involving a former revolutionary, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría), who lives on the streets, and gets by through the occasional gig as a hitman.

The world of Amores Perros, while certainly reflecting many of the social realities of Mexico City at the turn of the millennium, is also one of heightened melodrama. Iñárritu drew inspiration not only from his country’s rich national cinema, particularly the golden age of the 1940s and ’50s, but from modern telenovelas, in which emotions are laid bare and hairpin dramatic turns are the norm. And, of course, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, whose interlocking, overlapping narrative structure is an unmistakable source of influence.

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Iñárritu, however, is after something more primal, or some might say simplistic, in Amores Perros than perhaps any of the filmmakers who influenced him. Both Octavio’s betrayal of his brother, Ramiro (Marco Pérez), in the first act and El Chivo’s decision to leave two feuding brothers tied up with a loaded gun between them in the third act are clearly rooted in the biblical story of Cain and Abel. In fact, betrayal, in the most intimate and corrupting of ways, is a key component of each story, as is the notion that seemingly good men can commit heinous acts when trying to carve out lives for themselves in a hostile and unforgiving environment.

It’s fitting, then, that the defining figure in Amores Perros is the dog—an animal whose tendencies toward both tenderness and ruthlessness, each typically in the service of self-preservation, are reflected in the journeys of all three male protagonists in the film. Octavio is at first kind and loving toward his brother’s dog, Cofi, having assumed the responsibility of its care, but the man eventually decides to train the animal for dog fights, trying to capitalize on its killer instincts as a means to earning enough money to leave town with Susana. Cofi returns again in El Chivo’s story, when the hitman nurses him back to health only to later learn of his violent streak. But unlike Octavio or Cofi, El Chivo isn’t on a path toward self-destruction, but rather toward redemption, or at least self-forgiveness, as he yearns to reconcile with the daughter (Lourdes Echevarría) he abandoned years ago and who now believes him to be dead.

At one point, El Chivo says that “masters take after their dogs,” but it’s very much a two-way street in Amores Perros. Where Octavio’s ruthlessness surfaces only after Cofi’s first kill, the helplessness of Valeria’s smaller pooch, Ritchie, mirrors her own in the wake of a car accident that links several of the film’s characters. And in the final act, it’s El Chivo’s act of kindness that reveals the extent of both Cofi’s lethal and loving instincts. The catalyst of all three stories are actions that stem from the characters’ most base impulses and emotions, and the consequences that follow, but it’s the curious manner in which they’re reflected by and refracted through one another that makes them more compelling as a unified whole than as individual tales. If the film’s structural intricacies feel a bit rote, and its two-and-a-half-hour runtime somewhat oppressive, there’s a blunt, unrestrained poeticism to Iñárritu’s debut feature that leaves it, two decades later, still feeling very much alive.

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Image/Sound

Much of Amores Perros’s visual dynamism stems from cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s use of the bleach-bypass process on the film’s negative, and Criterion’s transfer of a new 4K digital restoration—supervised by Prieto and Alejandro González Iñárritu—retains the heightened graininess and hyper-saturated colors that are the product of the technique. Exterior scenes, particularly those in Octavio’s storyline, feature eye-popping yellows and reds, while the overall image abounds in rich textures. The 5.1 DTS-HD master audio is also quite robust, featuring a well-balanced mix with a strong separation of tracks that’s particularly noticeable in the more chaotic sequences, such as the dog fights and the car chase that opens the film.

Extras

Criterion’s release features two new conversations, one between Iñárritu and director Pawel Pawlikowski, and the other with Iñárritu and actors Adriana Barraza, Vanessa Bauche, and Gael García Bernal. In the first, Iñárritu discusses the troubled state of the Mexican film industry in the late ’90s, and that because young Mexican filmmakers typically only got one shot to make an impression, he chose to tell a sprawling story, and in audacious fashion, with his debut feature. In the second conversation, Iñárritu muses on the film’s challenging and lengthy pre-production process, while the three actors recount their memories from the shoot and how they’ve responded to rewatching Amores Perros over the years.

The longest of the extras, “Perros, Amores, Accidentes,” consists of 45 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage, with a particular focus on the bank robbery and car chase sequences and the scenes set at various dog fights. There’s also some additional footage of actual dog fights recorded in Mexico City, captured as research for the film. Needless to say, these stretches aren’t for the faint of heart, but they’re at least countered to some degree by later shots of the on-set dog trainers ensuring that no dog was harmed in the making of Amores Perros.

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Film scholar Paul Julian Smith’s 25-minute video essay takes a different approach than most such essays produced by Criterion, curiously focusing less on the film’s aesthetics than on Iñárritu’s background in radio and commercials as well as the unique graphic design used in the film’s opening titles and its various press and promotional materials. The disc is rounded out with a brief interview with the film’s composer, Gustavo Santaolalla, 10 minutes of rehearsal footage with musings from Iñárritu, and an assortment of deleted scenes, music videos, and trailers. The release also includes a bounded booklet with incisive essays by critic Fernanda Solórzano and author Juan Villoro that speak to the film’s enduring influence.

Overall

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s sprawling, kinetic debut feature gets a solid HD transfer and a generous heaping of varied extras from the Criterion Collection.

Score: 
 Cast: Emilio Echevarría, Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Álvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche, Jorge Salinas, Marco Pérez, Rodrigo Murray, Humbero Busto  Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu  Screenwriter: Guillermo Arriaga  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 154 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Release Date: December 15, 2020  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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