Great Directors: Iñárritu offers three fates

***This is the fourth of five in-depth essays on great directors.***

Of all the films we have discussed here, Amores Perros is probably the most straightforward of them all. It’s not as linear as No Country For Old Men or A Clockwork Orange — although it’s about as chronologically sound as The Conformist — Amores Perros is still one of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s more basic pictures. 21 Grams leapt through time to visit its characters at contrasting points in their story arcs, and Babel involved a larger cast (megastars no less) and a variety of languages in a number of different countries. Those films, sometimes mistaken as American films, were grander in scope and execution. Simple little Amores Perros — at a not-so-simple 150 minutes running time — follows three sets of lives in one city using one language across what may be about a month of film time. But don’t assume that Amores Perros, with its easier plot devices like its identifiable chapters and title cards, is any less important. If anything it might be Alejandro González Iñárritu’s finest work, especially if you consider that his later works are clones of a similar idea examined in this, his directorial debut.

Iñárritu, sometimes called the Mexican Altman because of the way he interweaves people’s lives together on film, has writers on his pictures, but I think he must fancy himself as a quasi-documentarian. His films deal with life, the way we glide (or maybe scrape) through it, and the way choices and actions never end with the person making them. If every cause has an effect, every action has a reaction, then Iñárritu has tasked himself with looking at both sides of that dynamic, but from two different perspectives. He does this using handheld cameras, minimal lighting, found (and very real) locations and an attention to detail that is almost journalistic in its honesty. What we see in Amores Perros, excluding the plot (although even that perhaps), is not unlike anything we might actually see in a major Mexican city. His characters do real things, the way real people would actually do them. I think that’s one of his major contributions to film — he can coax honest performances from his stars.

Speaking of honesty, let’s consider the tagline to Amores Perros: “Love. Betrayal. Death.” Those three little words represent the entire film, and the periods between indicate they’re separate sentences, or separate stories. “Love” belongs to Daniel and Valeria, who are one-third of the film’s bulk. Daniel has cheated on his wife with Valeria (and his wife, or possibly another girlfriend, calls and hangs up randomly); Valeria, a professional model, is injured in the car crash that serves as the film’s ground zero. The struggle with her leg, her failing career and her missing dog are compounded all at once as Daniel does his best offering care. Their love unites them when all else threatens to tear them apart. “Betrayal” belongs to Octavio and Susana, the brother and his sister-in-law who commiserate over their lots in life while Susana cares for a child (with another on the way) and Octavio fights his dog Cofi in vicious dog fights. Just when he’s ready to run away with her, she betrays him by stealing the money he’s raised fighting Cofi. Later she betrays him twice more: once when she vows to name her unnamed baby after her dead husband, thus not after Octavio, and again when she refuses to meet him at the bus stop. “Death” belongs to El Chivo, the homeless man with the mysterious past. Of course, El Chivo deals in death as a hired gun, but he also witnesses it firsthand when Cofi is brought into his home and slaughters his other dogs, pets he looked upon as family members. It’s ironic that he’s “Death” and that his daughter thinks her father is dead — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy he’s involved himself in.

“Love. Betrayal. Death.” — those are the themes for their respective chapters, but also for every chapter. “Love” could count for Octavio, who loved his sister-in-law, and for El Chivo, who so truly loved his animals and his daughter yet gives them up to the cruelty of his world. “Betrayal” works for El Chivo, who is betrayed by the dog he saved, and for Daniel and Valeria, who betray another woman, Daniel’s wife, so they can be together. Alejandro González Iñárritu has crafted a labyrinth of intersecting lives and emotions. The fact that they so accurately represent each character and story goes to his credit. Besides, juggling all this at once can’t be easy to do as a director.

More than anything, though, Amores Perros is about how three sets of people react to a common problem that has been grafted into their lives. If ground zero is the crash, then all three chapters are altered by it, and the sum of the film’s importance is not the crash and everything prior to it, but the crash and everything after. Yes, the film explores how the crash happens and what people were doing before it, but only because it allows us to contrast the before with an after. The real purpose of the film is to examine what changes in these people’s lives after the crash. Octavio, the architect of the crash — although, not its aftermath — tries to cope with the betrayal of Susana, yet he still can forgive her when she turns up after her husband’s death. Watch how Octavio, who could not appropriately cope with the betrayal of his dog Cofi during the dog fight in the pool, forgives Susana long enough to be betrayed two more times. After the crash Daniel shows his compassion, even as his model girlfriend returns home disfigured and broken. Valeria just wants a companion, which is when her dog goes missing under the floorboards. By the time Daniel tears up the wooden slats on the floor, he’s saving more than a dog, but his relationship. Finally, El Chivo is affected the most. After adopting Cofi and after the dog kills the other pets, the homeless father can finally see what senseless killing is capable of doing on the greater landscape of a person’s life — it’s interesting that he learns of his humanity from a canine. Without this important lesson he would have killed the businessman and been the same miserable soul wandering the street. Instead, because of the accident and its various effects, he can have the courage to stop the cycle of death and make small contact with his daughter.

Iñárritu weaves all this together masterfully, involving us explicitly in the agony of life. Existentialists believe in a great contradiction examined profoundly by Jean-Paul Sartre: Mankind is bound by its freedoms, doomed by our ability to choose. Amores Perros definitely plays that up with every scenario it allows us to witness. I think it reaches its zenith with El Chivo, who drastically comes to realize he’s doomed to choose, but, by damn, he will choose what he views to be the right decision. When he walks off on that black landscape, scraped of all life and color, he acknowledges that his decisions are nothing but what we make them, and he has decided to fade into the tapestry of Mexico, of life, of Alejandro González Iñárritu.