In fact the dog actually belongs to his brother Ramiro (Marco Perez), and Octavio comes to admire Cofi at the same time as he falls in love with his brother's wife Susana - an outstanding performance here from Vanessa Bauche - and conceives the idea of using Cofi's winnings as the means of running away with Susana and starting a new life with her.
Los amores perros professional#
And Cofi himself, the mute and dignified hero of the story, becomes a metonym for the sufferings of his handler and professional associate, Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal). Inarritu presents this as an act of charity - almost one of grace - in a world where dogs have come to look like our deracinated souls. When he sees the crash, El Chivo carries Cofi away with him, and nurses him back to some sort of health.
They symbolise his misanthropy and alienation: a sense of gloomy estrangement which becomes clearer as his own unhappy family drama is brought into the story. She can hear the luckless beast, scrabbling and whimpering under the floor, symbolising her persistent low-level anxiety and acting as a presentiment of future calamity - a telltale heart of disaster.Įl Chivo himself has a posse of dogs, and tending to them constitutes the sum total of his emotional life. Valeria is obsessed with her small lapdog, Richie, which disappears through a hole in the floor of the love-nest apartment and can't get out. Both of these plots involve dogs - dogs are the motif and parodic spiritual centre of each.
Los amores perros driver#
And the driver of the other car involved in the crash is a beautiful and highly strung young model, Valeria (Goya Toledo), who has just persuaded a middle-aged man to leave his wife and daughters. The crash distracts a guerrilla-turned-hobo-hitman, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), from carrying out a murder his family crisis is revealed as he pursues a commission to kill a businessman on behalf of the prospective victim's own brother. These sub-plots are duly interwoven with the main plot, though notably more loosely - and with far less narrative/perspective trickery - than in Tarantino's films or in imitations such as Doug Liman's comedy Go, or, more recently, Harald Zwart's One Night at McCool's. The dog fight scenes, although somehow always contriving to keep the gut-wrenching coup de garce off screen, are nevertheless quite explicit enough to be going on with.Īnd in the best Tarantino tradition, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu makes the eventual crash, which effectively seals the fate of Cofi and his two handlers, the crux of two other storylines, each finding their own fateful moment in the accident. But how extraordinary to think of the fuss made about the teeny little pastoral moments of animal violence in that film compared to the gobsmackingly candid dog-on-dog action seen here. This corrida of the criminal classes was hinted at, very cautiously, in Guy Ritchie's film Snatch, when Brick Top leads his associates through a terrible lock-up, gesturing negligently at a canine corpse surrounded by glum Crombie-wearing men: "D'you like a good dogfight?" he inquires genially. The problem is that Cofi is a dog, the pampered champ of a high-rolling dogfight, and has just been made the subject of what amounts to an unsuccessful assassination attempt by a rival trainer in the middle of a contest it's an incident which has led to the inevitable grisly confrontation between two sponsors of the sport of underworld kings. One of them, Cofi, whimpering and shuddering with pain, has taken a bullet Luis is pressing his hand up against the wound to staunch the flow of blood.
Three inhabitants of a car are being chased through Mexico City by a gun-wielding gang in a truck.
Los amores perros movie#
T he opening car-chase sequence of this movie delivers the kind of unapologetic rocket-fuelled rush of excitement not experienced since the days of Tarantino in the early 1990s.