Edinburgh Festival - Bob Flynn finds merit in a controversial film that might never pass the censors
The film programme at the Edinburgh Festival is very much a Cannes ram-raid of choices, but it is hardly stuffed with major studio output, and at least includes some challenging productions. Amores Perros is undoubtedly this year's controversy, and was given a major slot among the festival screenings. The feature debut of the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the Critics Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It is a bruising yet philosophical work set in the sweltering heart of modern-day Mexico City; it is also extremely violent, and may never see the light of any other British projector.
What's the problem? We love screen violence; it is part of our natural hunger for vicarious action - we recently went out in droves to see Gladiator, and gleefully watched men cut each other to pieces, just like the Romans did. And it is not just the allure of the multiplex spectacle: art-house audiences fell deeply in love with Quentin Tarantino (who has writer's block, they say) and his unrelenting world of humorous torture and jokey death in Reservoir Dogs.
Speaking of which, one distributor in Edinburgh's phalanx of industry delegates told me that he wouldn't bother with Amores Perros. Why was that? It's not exactly light entertainment, but it's a brilliant, if bruising, panorama of city loves and lives on the edge. It was, he explained, because it would never get past the British Board of Film Classification - and not because of the violence per se, but because of the dogs.
Amores Perros is about colliding lives in a dramatic intertwining of stories, like Robert Altman on speed. The problem is that it features dogfights. We might never get to the bottom of the ongoing debate about the effect of screen violence but, in a world of slowly dissolving taboos, the depiction of dogfighting may result in this superb film being banned from British screens.
From its opening frames, Inarritu's wild, shocking, impassioned film is like mainlining on visual extremes. His extreme close-ups hijack you, bringing you to the broiling heat of Mexico City, inside a car zigzagging through the traffic as a black dog lolls on the back seat, drenched in blood. Two panicking, shouting young punks in the front smash into another car with an impact that lifts you out of your seat.
The title translates as Love's a Bitch, and it features dogs fighting to the death in an illegal gambling den. Inarritu develops the drama into a colour-saturated epic that explores the dark and light of the urban soul with a deep moral conviction. Ignoring its narrative complexity and concentrating instead on its violent images, the RSPCA and animal rights groups have already attacked the Amores Perros, despite an official disclaimer that no dogs were injured in the filming.
Three stories are linked by the scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga, as lives criss-cross in the city chaos. All the characters, at differing levels of society, own dogs, and use them to express love and the violence around them. Living in the city slums, Octavio shares a house with his brother, Ramiro, and his wife, Susana. Secretly in love with Susana, Octavio owns a big, black dog and sees a way to get rich by entering the pet in underworld fights. The dog wins every match, and Octavio gives all the winnings to his sister-in-law, hoping to escape poverty and take her with him. Later, Valeria, a lithe young model, houses her fluffy pet dog in the love nest bought by her wealthy, adulterous lover. But she will be crippled by the car driven by Octavio in his desperate escape from a rival dogfight gang. Lovers and fighters rush past as a down-and-out El Chivo, a former communist guerrilla turned assassin-for-hire, roams the city with a pack of stray hounds.
Unlike Tarantino's films, this panoramic tale, comparing men and dogs, examines the consequences of violence and questions our destructive nature, rather than exalts in it. Inarritu's deliberately provocative feature carries a reflective, redemptive poetry that, unfortunately, may never be shown again after the curtain comes down in Edinburgh.
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