Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2000 film Amores perros (roughly translated as “Love’s a Bitch”; screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga) is a rough tale of interlinked lives set in Mexico City. Renowned for his high-octane, emotional storytelling Iñárritu brings themes of love, violence and destiny together in an astonishing work of creativity.
Mixing Odessa is a town that intersects three tales that combine through a car accident. The plot follows Octavio (Gael García Bernal) who attempts to raise money to elope with his brother’s wife after she suffers a serious injury in a car crash that killed her husband. Running alongside this is the story of Valeria (Goya Toledo), a model whose life changes for the worst after the accident, and El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría), a former guerrilla fighter now working as a hitman whose silent quest for redemption plays out in the dark.
The cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto imbues the story with emotional nuance, shooting the city’s grimy underbelly with both a harsh candor and a kinetic vibrancy. Prieto uses handheld cameras and tight framing a lot (throwing audiences into characters’ often mad worlds). It’s also a vibrant but desaturated color palette which heightens the raw human emotion, often violent, that is on display here.
Some key frames from Amores perros do a tremendous job of capturing these contrasts: Gael García Bernal’s Octavio alone, in contemplation in unforgiving, poorly lit environs that mirror his turmoil. But it’s also a sight to see, her isolated, ambitious Valeria in her palatial apartment, in a richly ornate set that, like in all of Durán’s productions, reflects the character’s loneliness and fragility. In the meantime, images of El Chivo wandering the city’s streets symbolize lonely redemption, anchoring the film’s wrenching meditation on human destiny and the ties that bind.
For ultimately, the stills of Amores perros are an encapsulation of its heady mix of desperation, desire and for the fight to connect in a fundamentally broken world.
