Amores Perros
Amores Perros has been showered with praise and awards since it's release in 2000. I've literally been wanting to watch this movie for years now and finally got round to doing it a few days ago and boy was it a good choice. It straight away enters my top 10 favourite foreign movies.
The movie focuses on three main stories which are all joined together by a car crash involving many of the main characters in the movie.
The first story is about Octavio, a young man who is in love with his brother's wife and has been entering dog-fighting contests and winning a lot of money using the family dog Cofi. He intends to use this money to run away with his brothers wife.
The second story centres around Daniel and Valeria, a married man and a model who are having an affair. Their relationship is strained when Valeria gets in a serious accident and is confined to a wheelchair, to make things worse her beloved dog Richie, who at many times she seems to love more than Daniel, disappears into a hole in the floor of the appartment they stay in. His disappearance causes a lot of strain on the relationship and leads to many fights between them.
The final segment is about El Chivo, a homeless man who walks the streets with his group of stray dogs and is also a hitman.
The structure of this film is similar to Tarantino's work where stories are inter locked and spread across time, sometimes meeting and other times moving forward or backwards in time. In fact the opening scene is strangely similar to the opening sequence from Reservoir Dogs, with a dog in the backseat instead of a man.
This isn't however a cheap rip off of a Tarantino flick, director Inarritu has his own distinctive style and brings it across in this masterpiece. Respect must be given to cinematographer Rodrigo Pieto who shoots the movie superbly. The car scene which connects the movie together was apparently shot with 9 cameras, including one hidden in a trash can. The script is also powerful and conveys the emotions of the movie beautifully.
The performances from the cast are just as brilliant as the behind the scenes work and Bernal as Octavio is arguably the strongest performance of the lot. The soundtrack is brilliantly done and the songs chosen are perfect for the scenes they are used in.
If you can make it through the brutal and violent dog fighting scenes at the beginning of the movie you're in for a cinematic experience. The acting, directing, sound and script fit together perfectly to create one of the best movies, foreign or otherwise, from the past decade. Any director would be hardpressed to make better use of a $2 million budget. Amores Perros is the first movie I have awarded a 5 star rating to and it is certainly deserving.