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Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch) is the grippingly intense 2000 film from director Alejandro González Iñárritu which tells three stories of three groups of people whose lives are brought together an horrific car accident.
Set in three segments, the movie follows the lives of the three groups of people as their stories up to, during, and after the car accident event which binds their stories together. Octavio (Gael García Bernal) lives with his mother, his brother Ramiro (Marco Pérez), Ramiro’s wife Susana (Vanessa Bauche) and his dog. Their live a lower-middle class life in Mexico with a great deal of tension between Daniel and his wife and his brother. Octavio secretly pines for his brother’s wife and hates his brother for the abusive criminal that he is. Valeria is trapped in a marriage to Daniel where she is abused, but is unwilling to change her situation or accept Octavio’s romantic advances. In an effort to change this, Daniel begins fighting his dog against other dogs to earn money to help him convince Valeria to run away with him. After a bad thing happens at such a dog fighting match Octavio flees through the streets and causes a car accident involving the next set of characters.
In the second story Valeria (Goya Toledo) is a big celebrity involved with a recently divorced man named Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero) and her dog. Her car is the one Octavio strikes and she is critically wounded. She is confined to a wheelchair and has an elaborate stabilization unit attached like an exoskeleton to her leg to prevent her moving it. She is unhappy and often terrified of what will happen to her career now that she is no longer beautiful. She amuses herself by playing fetch with her dog, but when her dog accidentally falls through a hole in the floor and doesn’t seem to want to come out, Daniel’s refusal to remove all of the floor coverings to search for him leads to massive fight between the two. Valeria’s leg worsens in pain and Daniel is finally able to get her to a hospital where the doctor informs him that due to a complication, her leg had to be amputated.
The witness the horrific accident the individual involved in the final part of Amores Perros called El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría) who is a homeless man who cares for a group of stray dogs and, it is later revealed, used to be an active revolutionary and now takes contract killing assignments for money. When he is contracted for one such assignment he witnesses the car crash and finds Octavio’s badly wounded dog and decides to nurse it back to health. The dog heals, but can’t rid itself of its nature and when El Chivo leaves it alone, it kills all of his dogs viciously causing El Chivo to have an epiphany.
The whole of the film tells the story about love, the harsh reality of life, and the shocking events necessary for the characters to endure in order for their to each have their moment of realization as to what is truly important in life and what is necessary to fix their lives to allow that important thing back into it. It is emotionally enthralling and deeply touching with a superb cast acting to the best of their abilities, clever direction and coloring, magnificently subtle special effects, and what feels like such a real set of stories it’s almost difficult to believe it’s fiction.
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