Amores Perros- Does Not Mean Puppy Love

I wasn't too excited about watching Amores Perros the first time I saw it after all I translated the title to "Puppy Love" and I don't typically go for rom-coms, but the reviews were good and I decided to give it a shot without knowing anything about it. When their title translation, "Love's a Bitch", popped on screen, I knew I was in for something completely different than I expected.

So far all of my discussions have been about negative aspects of well-known American releases, so it's about time I praise an independent film from Mexico. This piece is written to contrast with the discussion of Babel which handled multiple storylines very poorly. Amores Perros is my favorite foreign language film and it deserves all the praise it gets.

The three storylines in Amores Perros can all be traced back to the actions of two characters: El Chivo and Cofi, the big black dog. In the opening scene, the Dog Fighting Jerk is looking for a dog his dog can slaughter. You know, not for the money or anything. Just for the pure, clean fun of animal cruelty. To get back to the real roots of dog fighting. (There may have been some sarcasm in there. It's hard to say.) And he points his dog at a pack of dogs, but a surprisingly sane, dog man (in contrast to a crazy, cat lady) pulls out a machete and the Dog Fighting Jerk aims his soon-to-be-dead dog at Cofi. Later on, we find out that the surprisingly sane, dog man is El Chivo, the star of our third story. Cameo Del Chivo sets off the entire course of events in the Octavio storyline and it also sets up an important scene in story Del Chivo.

This is the most significant cameo in the film, but if you watch carefully the central characters in one storyline will make an appearance in the other two. For example, Octavio watches the talk show Valeria was on when her life was perfect. That perfection begins to fall apart immediately after her little run in with Octavio, which happened because he was distracted by Cofi dying and Dog Fighting Jerk trying to kill him, a direct result of El Chivo defending his pack.

El Chivo is at the scene of the crash and he nurses Cofi back to health. Cofi then kills all his dogs because of the training he received after El Chivo redirected the Dog Fighting Jerk. So by defending his dogs in the opening scene, El Chivo precipitates their murder in the third act. (Damn you, dramatic irony!) And after El Chivo spares Cofi, he reconsiders how he lives his life, altering the second half of his plotline.

Every event in Amores Perros is triggered in that opening scene and every plot is greatly altered by the crash scene. And that's how you do multiple plotlines.