Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez I-arritu, Love’s a Bitch (Amores Perros in Spanish) tells the story of three very different types of people, runs for two-and-a-half hours and, if that sounds a bit clinical, it’s a passionate but lucid masterpiece.
There are no special effects, no grand skyline shots to tell us we’re in Mexico City. What links the three types on a socio-economic level is that typical act of urban violence, a car crash in the world’s largest city. What links them more intimately is an older and more universal symbol, their dogs.
The working-class boy Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) uses his Rottweiler in stomach-churning dog fights so that he can earn enough money to sponsor his quixotic notion of eloping with his sister-in-law Susana (Vanessa Bauche). Their lives are as brutal and exploited as their dogs’, but they are also exploiters and therefore cursed.
The middle-class model Valeria (Spanish actress Goya Toledo) has a clean, fluffy and noisy little thing that perfectly echoes her. But when she moves into a new apartment with her married lover Daniel (Alvaro Geurrero), pooch disappears beneath the sleek floorboards to a netherworld infested with rats. Valeria’s life becomes as riddled with anxiety and as viciously cursed, in its own sterile way, as the dogfights.
Interestingly, one feels irritable and suffocated by this section with its magazine good looks after the simmering sexuality and violence of the first, even though that section is hardly romanticised; one can almost smell the steamed washing in the poky flat with its old magazine photograph of a younger, healthier pope.
Thirdly, there is the bearded and half biblical tramp El Chivo (Emilio Echevarra), who turns out to be a lapsed academic and revolutionary. His presence is the most dominating, disturbing and impressive, for if he kills people for money and lives in abject squalor he dotes on his dogs.
Most unsettling, we don’t particularly care for those he kills or how he lives. We automatically take his side, which is wrong but we do. Until, that is, he finally speaks. Then he suddenly becomes quite disgustingly, cleverly human. Strangely, it is his return to silence and action that half redeems him and, oddly, us.
Gonzalez I-arritu’s theme might grimly be that betrayal and therefore reciprocal loss is as common as dirt and cuts across all classes – and he pointedly refers to Abel and Cain in his refreshingly literal and humorous way – but then he also comes up with a solution that is as complex philosophically as it is difficult to convey on screen.
The correct translation of the title should be “Love is a Dog”, which is only a clue, since Gonzalez I-arritu still subverts both the positive and negative implications of that cliché. But that is only a point of departure to convey writer Guilllermo Arriaga’s profound idea, which has much in common with what JM Coetzee has been saying of late, in a language that is as simple as it is exhilarating.