No sooner had Love’s a Bitch (Amores Perros) won a prize at the Cannes film festival than the RSPCA rushed to attack its bloody scenes of dogfighting. Arguing that “context is no defence”, the society declared: “Anything which involves goading or cruelty to animals is unacceptable.”
The film’s director, Alejandro Gonzalez I-arritu, insists he was scrupulous about not harming any animals during filming. Despite
realistic-looking scenes in which dogs leap at each other, fangs apparently primed to bite, a lot was done in the shooting and editing – “the same way I’d avoid hurting somebody in a car accident”.
The dogs were wearing plastic muzzles – apparently clearly visible if you freeze-frame the film on video – while the ones that appear dead and bloodied were made up and drugged for 20 minutes at a time. The film’s animal trainer is very respected in animal welfare circles, Gonzalez I-arritu says, “and he used his own dogs, so he cared about them”.
In Mexico, where the film has been a big hit, the press hardly commented on the animal cruelty question. There was certainly more of a problem in the United Kingdom. The British Board of Film Classification is rigorous about films that show or even suggest animal violence, and it released the following statement, “Baiting animals is a no-no as far as we are concerned, no matter how good the film is.”
While the subject matter could have been a serious obstacle to British distribution, Gonzalez I-arritu was open to suggestions about cuts. “If it was just frames, maybe. But if they wanted me to take out the dogfights, that would be impossible. They are part of the motion of the story and the characters.”
The movie is an intricately plotted portmanteau of three stories, linked by a car crash and told at car-crash speed. The first story has a group of impoverished kids getting involved in the illicit and extremely violent dog-fighting scene; the second is a macabre tale of the unexpected about a supermodel, a luxury apartment and an ill-fated lapdog; and the third features an itinerant hit man who moves through different levels of city society, bringing all the strands together.
Gonzalez I-arritu insists that context is very much a mitigating factor and that the dogfighting theme is part of an overall panorama of life in his home town.
“I wanted to make a film about Mexico City, where there are millions of dogs. The dogfight is a cruel reality. But more than the fights, we were interested in the relations between dogs and people.”
He and his screenwriter, novelist Guillermo Arriaga Jordan, took on the city with Balzacian ambition, tackling it on various levels, from low-life to penthouse.
“Many Mexican directors,” he says, “are scared to shoot in Mexico City, which is why there are many stories in Mexican cinema about little rural towns, or set a hundred years ago. It’s difficult to shoot there, not just technically but because it’s such a complex mix. All the city’s frontiers are falling – now you see rich districts where there are a lot of poor people.”
The three stories in Love’s a Bitch are more or less true. The character El Chivo (The Goat) was based on a story that Arriaga had heard about a teacher who disappeared to join a guerrilla cell and was never seen again (in the film, he becomes a hit man). The story in which a model’s lapdog is lost under her floorboards is also based on fact. “But in real life it ended when they noticed a bad smell from under the floor.”
The film’s intricately twisted structure has a ring of Pulp Fiction, but Gonzalez I-arritu isn’t a big fan of Quentin Tarantino. “I like the way he plays with structure, but I don’t know why he gets the credit. It’s really William Faulkner; it’s a literary structure that has existed for a long time.”
And Gonzalez I-arritu insists he takes his violence very seriously. “When you live in a city, as I do, where violence is really in the
streets and people die every day, there’s nothing funny about it. We try to show that violence has a consequence – when you create violence, it turns against you.”
Although Gonzalez I-arritu only attended two fights himself, he insists that his lurid vision of the dogfighting underworld is “very, very accurate. Thirty percent of the people in the movie are real people from the dogfighting world and we used some real fighting dogs. It’s shown the way they do it, in empty swimming pools and backlots. The people can be dangerous – there are drunk people, druggie people, violent people and some of them take their children of four, five years old. But I don’t judge them. For them it’s like bullfighting or going fishing – for them it’s natural, something you do on a Saturday.”
Gonzalez I-arritu admits he was afraid to handle the animals himself: “These dogs are real motherfuckers.” One animal used in the film was a security dog, trained to leap at a person’s chest and able to break ribs in the process.
Gonzalez I-arritu came to film after a career as a radio DJ on Mexico’s WFM rock station, where he had a daily show “telling stories to people, trying to keep them entertained for three hours. That was my training as a storyteller. You create stories with music, you create soundtracks for the lives of the people in the city – four million listeners every day.”
And four million stories in the naked city, no doubt. So far Gonzalez I-arritu has managed to tell three of them in one blast. Let’s hope there are more to come.