There is nothing more interesting to me than the minutiae of people’s lives; their desires, loves and ambitions; their faith, ethics, beliefs and actions. When those individuals live in a country far away, my fascination doubles.
So it was that I came to watch Amores Perres, the 2000 debut film feature of the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, written by Guillermo Arriaga. This film, like his later Biutiful (2010) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Feature Film
Iñárritu went on to achieve commercial as well as critical success with 21 Grams (2093), Babel(2006), Birdman (2014), and The Revenant (2015). Birdman garnered three Academy Awards - Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. The Revenant won a Best Director Oscar.
So the director went on to public acclaim. But Amores Perros was made when he was not yet famous, and is all the more gripping for not featuring Hollywood megastars but Mexican actors, giving the characters a gritty street feel. This is realism at its best.
Which is not to say, it’s always palatable. Following the lives of several individuals before, and after a catastrophic car crash, there are scenes which will make many people wince. I found it hard to watch the dogfighting. I don’t know how they managed to film these scenes, but I really hope it didn’t really involve setting dog on dog. As for the bloody corpses of dogs we occasionally see after these battles, they will be gruelling viewing for any animal lovers, but I’m hoping they were down to excellent special effects. Surely even Mexico couldn’t allow such barbaric events to happen for real simply for the cinema.
But then, real working class life does often involve violence, and not often through choice. For every thug making a living through serious crime, there are others either struggling through quietly or sinking without trace into drugs or alcohol.
Octavio (Gael García Bernal)is a handsome, cheeky young man from a crowded working-class home. His mother keeps house, his father is no longer there, his older brother Ramiro (Marco Perez) is an aggressive lunk who, frustrated with his job on the till of a supermarket, looks for faster ways to make big bucks.