Amores Perros

Amores Perros

Opening Shot

A car tears through Mexico City streets. A bleeding dog in the backseat. Gunshots from behind. Rodrigo Prieto's camera is in the car, rattling, barely in focus, and the energy is immediate and physical. Then: the crash. The intersection where three stories will collide. Iñárritu opens at the point of impact and then rewinds each thread to show how it got there. The structure is the argument: these lives are connected, and the connection is violent.

What It Does

Prieto's handheld cinematography gives Mexico City a rawness that American films about the city never capture. The dogfighting sequences are shot at floor level, in cramped rooms, with the camera taking hits from the action. The supermodel's apartment is pristine and overlit. The homeless man's streets are shot in desaturated tones that make the city look like it's been drained of blood. Each storyline gets its own visual identity, and Prieto makes the transitions between them feel like channel surfing through the same city's nightmares.

Gustavo Santaolalla's guitar work (years before his Brokeback Mountain score) gives the film an acoustic intimacy that counterweights the visual chaos. The music is lonely, simple, played as if by a man sitting in a room adjacent to the violence. Santaolalla scores the aftermath rather than the events: the quiet moment when the damage becomes real.

Gael García Bernal, in his breakout role, plays Octavio with a young man's specific blend of bravery and stupidity. He enters dogfighting to make money to run away with his brother's wife, and Bernal plays the romantic delusion with such conviction that you root for him even when the plan is clearly insane. The ensemble across all three stories is uniformly excellent, but Bernal's section has the most emotional voltage.

Why It's on the List

Amores Perros announced a new Mexican cinema and a new structural approach to storytelling simultaneously. Iñárritu, Prieto, and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga proved that the multi-strand, collision-point narrative could carry genuine emotional weight rather than just cleverness. The film's influence on 21st-century cinema (Crash, Babel, 21 Grams) is direct, and Iñárritu's original remains the most visceral and least sentimental of the lot. The dogs aren't metaphors. They're the test: how you treat the thing that depends on you is who you are.

The Argument Against

The 154-minute runtime is padded in the third segment (El Chivo's storyline), which moves more slowly than the other two and resolves less satisfyingly. The animal violence, while not gratuitous, is genuinely difficult and will lose some audiences regardless of the film's artistic intentions. And the intersection-collision structure, while innovative in 2000, became so widely imitated in the following decade that the film's formal originality now requires historical context to appreciate.

Closing Image

El Chivo walks away from the city with his dogs. He's made a phone call to the daughter who doesn't know he's alive. He's left a photograph and money in her apartment. The highway stretches into the distance. Mexico City recedes. The old man and his dogs are the only things moving. The city, and all its intersecting cruelties, continues without him.