Amores Perros

Amores Perros is an intriguing film detailing the struggles and complications of love. The English title of the film is Love’s a Bitch, a rough translation and a fitting title for a film which details numerous relationships with both dogs and people. The film is set around the events leading up to and after a car crash that drastically affects the lives of three main sets of people.

It starts off focusing on Octavio and his friends as he wins money dog fighting to help his brother’s wife. The next part of the film focuses around Daniel and Valeria, a magazine publisher and a model. Their love is tested while Valeria suffers serious medical issues causing her to question whether she will ever model again. Their relationship is further tested after Valeria's dog gets into trouble. The third focus of the film is on a man named El Chivo. He left his family when his daughter was only two and was forced to live the lie that he was dead to his daughter. After getting out of jail he lived his life in a shack taking care of dogs. He is also becomes a hitman and his hired to kill someone's brother. When he finds out the relation between the man that hired him and the man he was supposed to murder, he decides to turn things around and test the two of them.

The film is written and edited in a style similar to the popular movie, Crash. While Crash's goal was to show the ugliness of racial stereotypes and and prejudices, Amores Perros focused mainly on the up and downsides of love. Both films, however, start near the beginning with a car crash and show several stories explaining what happened before the crash. Amores Perros goes farther than crash and spends almost half the time after the car crash and using the crash not as an ending, but as the cause for several of the main characters' problems.

Dogs are used throughout the film almost as substitutes for humans. Each main section of the movie has a character in love with their dog, loving it almost like they love the other humans in their lives. The dog fighting throughout the film, but particularly in Octavio's section, is used to show the violence between humans. The savage way in which the dogs are used to attack each other and the humans compete with their dogs is similar to how the movie is trying to display society as a whole. A disfunctional mess.

The film does an excellent job making the actions and storyline seem realistic. The mise-en-scène created by the film by the lighting, costumes, and sets allow the audience to understand more about the characters than what the narrative tells them. The mise-en-scène helps display the wealth and struggles the characters have to go through. The editing of the film weaving the main and side characters into each others subplot also made the film more interesting. The inclusion of El Chivo in the first two stories and the chance shot of El Chivo seeing Octavio's brother and his brother's wife helped further show how connected everyone in the film and in the real world are. Although the film is long, the three subplots and their interwoven stories with deep depictions of the many types of love make Amores Perros a great film.