"Love's a Bitch" redirects here. For the song by Quiet Riot, see
Metal Health.
Amores perros is a 2000 Mexican film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is an anthology film containing three distinct stories which are connected by a car accident in Mexico City. Each of the three tales is also a reflection on the cruelty of humans toward animals and each other, showing how they may live dark or even hideous lives. Amores Perros was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2000 and won the Ariel Award for Best Picture from the Mexican Academy of Film.
The film was released under its Spanish title in the English-speaking world, although its title was sometimes translated as Love's a Bitch in marketing. In a 2001 interview on National Public Radio, director Iñárritu pointed out that an American English idiom, Love's a Bitch is not a satisfactory translation of the title[citation needed] (see below). The soundtrack included songs by well-known Latin American rock bands, such as Café Tacuba, Control Machete and Bersuit Vergarabat.
Plot
The film is constructed from three distinct stories linked by a car accident that brings the characters briefly together.
The first segment, "Octavio and Susana", stars Gael García Bernal and Vanessa Bauche as the title characters. Susana is Octavio's sister-in-law; however, Octavio is in love with her and doesn't like the way his brother, Ramiro, treats her. Octavio tries to persuade her to run away with him to get from under Ramiro's abuse. Needing to make money so that he and Susana can escape and start a life of their own, Octavio becomes involved in the business of dog fighting. Octavio makes enough money to run away with Susana, but Susana takes the money and leaves with her husband. Octavio continues his dog fighting business until a rival owner shoots his dog Cofi. Octavio stabs the rival owner and finds himself in a car chase with his lifelong friend, Jorge, and the wounded dog. A collision follows; Jorge dies and Octavio is badly injured.
The next segment, "Daniel and Valeria", stars Álvaro Guerrero and Goya Toledo. Daniel is a successful magazine publisher who leaves his family to live with the Spanish supermodel Valeria played by Goya Toledo. Unfortunately, Valeria's leg is severely broken in the accident with Octavio's car and may be unable to continue working as a model. Valeria is confined to a wheelchair while she recuperates in the apartment she shares with Daniel. Her dog Richie disappears under the floorboards one day and stays there for days. The missing dog triggers serious tension for the couple, causing numerous fights which leads to doubts about their relationship on both sides. Valeria re-injures her leg trying to help the dog, resulting in severe internal bleeding which leads to gangrene. Her doctor is forced to amputate the leg, removing any chance she might have had at returning to her modeling career. Once her leg is gone, she realizes that her life is most likely ruined since her sense of purpose, modeling, has been taken from her.
The final segment is called "El Chivo and Maru", and stars Emilio Echevarría and Lourdes Echevarría. The story concerns a former private school teacher who had become involved in guerrilla movements that landed him in prison for 20 years. He appears in the film as a bedraggled, nearly invisible vagrant pushing a junk cart accompanied by several mongrel dogs for whom he cares. Though he appears to live in perpetual squalor in an abandoned warehouse, he is in fact a professional hitman, El Chivo (The Goat). At times throughout his story, Chivo tries to make contact with his daughter, Maru, whom he abandoned when she was a two-year-old child when he began his guerrilla involvement. We learn in the film that instead of telling her the truth about the abandonment and the prison sentence, her mother told her that her father had died.
Meanwhile, Ramiro and an accomplice are attempting to rob a bank when he is shot and killed. Octavio, seriously injured from the accident, sees Susana for the first time since she and Ramiro fled with his money. Despite having been wronged, Octavio tries again to get Susana to run away with him.
El Chivo is hired by a man to kill his business partner, and Chivo is about to make the kill when the film's central car crash interrupts him. During the chaos at the crash scene, Chivo steals Octavio's wounded dog and takes it home to nurture it. While Chivo is away from the warehouse one day, the rescued dog kills all of the other dogs in the house. Chivo is intensely upset and prepares to kill the dog but forgives him. Still grieving for his beloved dogs, Chivo captures his intended victim, and after learning that the victim is the client's half-brother, he also captures his client. After shaving his beard and grooming his hair (a drastic change in his appearance) he leaves both men alive and chained to the separate walls with a pistol within reach between them, their fate left undetermined. He then breaks into his daughter's house while she is away, leaves a message on her answering machine and a large bundle of money, then disappears again.
Production
The film was produced by Zeta Film and AltaVista Films. Production began on 12 April 1999.
Awards
Translation of amores perros
Among the few Spanish language lines found on the official amores perros website are these:
Si tu historia acabó bien, explícalo en el canal de "amores". Si acabó mal, explícalo en "perros"[3] (If your story turned out well, put it down to "amores." If bad, put it to "perros."). To the author of these lines, amores is life's "goodness" or "sweetness" as in the Spanish aphorism, Hechos son amores, que no buenas razones. (Accomplishments are loveable, good excuses are not.) And "perros" is wretchedness, as in, ¡Esta perra vida! (This wretched life!). Accordingly, with amores translating as that which is beautiful, pleasant and desirable in life, and perros that which is miserable and of bad luck, the word combination can translate to "sometimes you win, sometimes you lose."
All the same, posters for the movie often pose the question, ¿Qué es el amor?[4] (What is love?), followed by the film title, "amores perros," as a play on an answer, "amores perros," meaning "wretched loves". And surely "wretched" describes the human-to-human love-lives of the film's three protagonists. But all three characters have strong and dependable emotional bonds with their various beloved dogs. In this sense the interpretation of amores perros, is "amor es perros" which means "love is dogs".
See also
- Hyperlink cinema - the film style of using multiple inter-connected story lines.
References
- ^ http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=amoresperros.htm
- ^ http://www.empireonline.com/500/1.asp
- ^ Amores perros
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1827970048/tt0245712 Amores perros posters at IMDB
External links
