The Indy Film Club: Amores perros is a primordial stew of pain, desire and rage

The next pick in our new weekly film social is Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s electrifying debut. Clarisse Loughrey explains why the film helped revitalise Mexican cinema

The dog fighting sequences are so vivid that the film struggled to find a distributor in the UK after the RSPCA campaigned to have it banned (Rex)

All masters are like their dogs,” theorises El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), the weary sage of Amores perros. In Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s electrifying debut, he’s proven right. Whatever line exists between human and canine has been erased. The word “perros” can refer both to dogs and to the wretched (the film is sometimes marketed as Love’s a Bitch, though the title never caught on). Both are victims of senseless brutality. Both are treated as playthings and disposable tools.

Inarritu never turns his back to the cruelty on show. He paints each frame in blood: it sizzles on the grill of an upscale restaurant after a sudden assassination; it coats the windows of the cars involved in a high-speed collision; it’s matted into the fur of the hounds snapping at each other’s throats while men around them feverishly place bets.

The dog-fighting sequences are so vivid, in fact, that the film struggled to find a distributor in the UK after the RSPCA campaigned to have it banned. Those involved have stressed that the animals’ safety was put first: their muzzles were covered with fine fishing line, so that they could breathe easily but not bite each other. The violence is suggested, not shown. It’s a flurry of movement and a howling clamour.

The chaos inside the pit echoes that outside of it. On the sidelines stands Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal, in his feature debut), convinced that he can earn enough money from dog-fighting to run away with the woman he loves, Susana (Vanessa Bauche) – the wife of his violent and abusive brother Ramiro (Marco Perez). But he ends up slumped over his steering wheel, half-dead, after a traffic accident involving Spanish supermodel Valeria (Goya Toledo). The bones in her leg have been shattered. She recuperates in an apartment bought for her by a married man (Alvaro Guerrero). El Chivo, meanwhile, is a former revolutionary who wanders the streets and makes a meagre living as a hitman.

Inarritu is interested both in what unites these characters – shared loss, anguish, and regret – and what separates them. We learn everything that we need to know from the way they navigate the streets of Mexico City. Octavio’s story is frenetic. The camera seems jittery here. It’s always cutting away or shifting focus. He rushes from place to place, free to claim the streets as his own but always, as a man living in poverty, with death and devastation pacing behind him.

Valeria’s world is sleek and static. But she’s trapped, her movements limited not just by her injuries but by the lack of autonomy she possesses as a woman. She’s much like her little lap dog Ritchie, adored as a pretty thing. When the fallout of her accident means she dropped from a high-profile advertising gig, she loses both her value in society and her freedom. El Chivo is free to go where and do what he pleases, but only because his status as an outsider has rendered him invisible.

The film’s use of separate but interconnected storylines saw critics draw an obvious connection with Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It may have helped establish Inarritu as a buzzy, edgy new name in international cinema (the film was even nominated for an Academy Award), but the comparison downplays his role in the revitalisation of Mexican cinema. The collapse of state-funded film production in the early Nineties gave rise to a new generation of independent, low-budget filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro, Robert Rodriguez, Inarritu, and Alfonso Cuaron​. These artists were free to explore Mexico’s social and political division in whichever they liked, while their ingenuity was celebrated both at home and abroad.

Following Amores perros, Inarritu would bring his evocative, socially conscious vision to Hollywood with 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006). Birdman’s (2014) one-take approach and The Revenant’s (2015) gruelling locations are proof he’s only grown more ambitious in the passing years. If his methods ever come off as excessive, it’s only because he’s stayed true to the belief that cinema should be a truly visceral experience – a primordial stew of pain, desire and rage.

See the rest of the Indy Film Club picks here