IMDb #187 Review: Amores Perros (2000)

Source: Wikipedia

In gritty turn-of-the-millennium Guadalajara, three ugly yet beautifully intricate stories intertwine like tangles of Rottweiler guts spilled in the street.

We burst on the scene with a frenetic car chase and a gruesome wreck. (Best get used to the sight; it grows more emotionally destructive with each repeated viewing from a fresh perspective.)

The disjointed procession of depressing scenarios interlocks like a patchwork quilt. Sometimes it hurts to watch, like using the patchwork quilt to stuff back in the aforementioned Rottweiler guts. But it's stitched cleanly: seamlessly, with none of the gangrene of narrative muddling.

A ghetto guy lusts for his douchebag bro's hot wife, so he stacks up mad cash at the dogfighting pits...with his brother's dog. Meanwhile, the douchebag bro/husband works as a cash register monkey, moonlights as a petty storefront robber, and shamelessly philanders on the side. Also cheating on his wife is a kindly middle-class family man with two young daughters. Elsewhere, a fashion model suffers a debilitating injury and loses her dog under the floorboards (it's, uh...serious business). A small, nervous businessman offers big money to murder his business partner/half-brother. And, most mysterious of all, a hairy, wild-eyed old man lurks at the edges of the crowd, waiting for...something.

It's the best Spanish soap opera of all time.

The contrived coincidences veer toward the cruel and cynical; I swear the universe is out to destroy these people. The twisted romances depict human selfishness at its most ignoble. And the melodrama gets a free pass as painfully realistic reactions to unthinkably awful worst-case scenarios.

And when the whole picture unfolds, we can finally appreciate the Frankenstein monstrosity in its entirety. Naked, tortured, bestially intelligent, ugly yet beautiful in its intricacy.

153 minutes.