Review of Amores Perros (2000) by Andy D — 06 Feb 2009

Before I had the chance to watch this film, I was first welcomed to Inarritu's works on "Babel", which is pretty much the same in style with "Amores Perros", but deals with a different subject matter.

The three seemingly random but somehow connected stories of people are interrelated by a car crash. The best of the three stories is the first one, while the second one, which many found very redundant and unnecessary, was also very engaging.

The final part is the most emotional of the bunch, and as if all the characters' filtered emotions are collected by "El Chivo", which is very evident in his climactic emotional outburst in his daughter's room.

Gael Garcia Bernal's performance was very good and realistic, removing all his childish playfulness in "Y Tu Mama Tambien". Emilio Echevarria gave the best performance in this epic film, playing a very complicated, and almost an ambiguous character in the beginning, and as the story progresses, we learned more about him and learned to sympathize with him, a character which I doubt that can be portrayed better by any Hollywood mainstream actors today.

In terms of visual and music, it is almost indistinguishable with "Babel", but the inner messages of both films are very different, but very relevant for a person's life. The car crash, for me, was not meant to be taken literally, but instead, it was a metaphor for a person's devotion for love, because as depicted throughout the film, love is like a car crash, even though how painful and brutal it is, we must recover, recover, and recover, but after all, well, love's a bitch.