Amores Perros Memento
Cooper, Rand Richards
S C R E E N Rand Richards Cooper KILLING TINE 'Amoves Perros' & 'Memento' Isn't the durability of film noir amazing? With its dark visions of violence and despair, 1940s noir drew...
...Finally, in the most affecting of the three stories, we follow El Chivo, the assassin, living in an old warehouse, mumbling fondly to his dogs, bickering with clients who want people rubbed out...
...but believe me, Amores Perros is anything but...
...The rest of Memento comes at us in short sequences that move forward— whew!—but are arranged in reverse, tracking back in time from the revenge killing toward the original crime that incited it...
...A warning: Amores Perros is not for the queasy...
...Clues such as a facial scar or broken window portend events to come...
...Octavio's story discloses a generous intention gradually corrupted by greed and the seductions of success...
...Got that...
...His funhouse mirror makes watching Memento so arduous that halfway through, your brain feels scrambled...
...Nolan's hero is Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), an ex-insurance investigator trolling lowlife L.A...
...The intricate script, by Guillermo Arriaga, links these urban tales not merely by their fateful convergence, but by theme—romance gone way wrong—and by the presence of canines, who complete the title's punning declaration that love is a bitch...
...He keeps his characters just this side of a moral abyss— letting them linger with a distant view of redemption before toppling them into the cauldron of violence that is this overheated, disturbing, and hugely ambitious film...
...What looked like happiness turns out to have 19 been merely health and wealth...
...Unlike Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros takes violence seriously, offering incisive moral studies beneath all the dazzle and noise...
...I can't make new memories," he explains...
...Watching a film in reverse is a weird challenge...
...The image in the photo is so awful, we don't realize at first that it's getting fainter, and we're seeing time move backward...
...for the man who raped and murdered his wife...
...illicit sex, fast cars, more money...
...Leonard himself incurred a head injury in the assault, and suffers from a bizarre neurological deficit...
...Memento is a flashy noir thriller that gives the term retro a whole new meaning...
...Most young filmmakers would play this setup for indulgent irony—another hip hit man— and leave it at that...
...Run Lola Run, which used a similar replay to trace forking variations of fate...
...Its gruesomely witty opening shows a Polaroid of a point-blank killing, with a hand shaking the snapshot dry...
...Octavio and Susana" introduces us to the driver of the ill-fated getaway vehicle and his attempts to woo his sister-in-law away from his thuggish brother...
...Pearce brings a mien of agonized loss to his portrayal of Leonard, but Nolan does a lot of winking at us, and if s the winking thaf s most enjoyable, especially the joining of Leonard's disability to the rueful ironies and tough-guy attitudinizing of noir— the unscrupulous motel clerk who checks him into two rooms, knowing he won't recall he's paying two bills, or the femme fatale who taunts him: "It must be tough living from those little scraps of paper— you mix your laundry list with your grocery list, you end up eating your underwear for breakfast...
...As it turns out, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria, in a role of nearly Shakespearan profundity) yearns for reconciliation with the infant daughter he abandoned decades ago to join the revolution, and who believes him to be long dead...
...With its dark visions of violence and despair, 1940s noir drew from detective fiction, Expressionist visual aesthetics, and postwar existentialism to fashion a mean-streets romance of the anarchic underside of urban life...
...Now along comes writer-director Christopher Nolan, who won't even let us know what went before...
...It's a superb cinematic moment...
...That sounds cute...
...And indeed, the film weds a young filmmaker's stylistic brio to an old-fashioned humanism, giving us plenty of panache, but moral complexity and a broad social reach as well...
...Haifa-century later, whether in movies that follow the classic formula, like Get Carter or Croupier, or in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and its tongue-in-cheek neonoir imitators, the genre lives on—a favorite of younger directors in particular...
...There's been a spate of tricknarrative films in recent years: Go, a Gen-X Rashomon that replayed events from three points of view...
...Everything just fades...
...It's all suspiciously hip, especially for a debut director...
...There's no calm anywhere, except perhaps in the coolly sinister noir studies of rain-soaked avenues at night...
...Gonzalez Inarritu paints a lurid panorama of contemporary urban Mexico, a society brutally divided into winners and losers, driven by jealousy, treachery, desire, and the annihilating temptations of greed...
...20...
...Nolan's ingenious feats of engineering both slyly comment on, and immensely complicate, the already byzantine plotting of film noir...
...After Valeria sustains grievous, career-ending injuries in the car crash, her convalescence lays bare a dismal failure of love, dragging the couple into a pit of self-pity and raging recrimination where their former bliss is revealed as an illusion...
...and The Sixth Sense, whose ending threw into doubt our entire viewing of what went before...
...Daniel and Valeria" foEows the woman driving the third car, a glamorous fashion model for whom the collision causes a steep downturn of fortunes...
...It's a macabre bit of visual bravado...
...but despite surface similarities, Gonzalez Inarritu rejects Tarantino's brand of stylized nihilism...
...Unable to recall what happened last night, or even an hour ago, Leonard takes Polaroids of people, labels them with messages ("Don't trust his lies"), and sticks them in his pocket, for some continuity when the fog lowers again...
...This method would be hard enough if his goal were just to get down to the corner diner for a bowl of soup...
...Daniel and Valeria" administers a painful grace-underpressure test to a magazine editor and his mistress, living in a love-nest apartment (along with their pampered Lhasa apso, Richie—another pun, suggesting nouveau pretensions...
...they are effects of prior actions to be revealed later, in subsequent (but chronologically previous) scenes, as we work our way forward toward the crime that began it all...
...As for us, Memento keeps viewers in a similar state of narrative impairment...
...But the poor guy has to solve a murder...
...but Gonzalez Inarritu steers us toward a poignant epiphany...
...There's more blood here than in an "ER" episode—in one unforgettable image, blood sizzles away on a griddle after a restaurant assassination— and there's a violence to Rodrigo Prieto's photography as well, the frantic glimpses from speeding cars, the shaky handheld cameras pulling ultra-fast cuts...
...and "El Chivo and Maru" portrays an elderly homeless man wandering aimlessly near the scene of the accident, who rescues the hurt dog, and who turns out to be neither homeless nor aimless, but a former revolutionary guerrilla-cum-bedraggled eccentric who roams the city with his dogs, earning money as an occasional hit man...
...Or maybe not...
...To see him lingering outside the apartment where she now lives, a grown woman, is to sense the tragedy of revolutionary idealism, which left him with a single useful trade— violence—and a haunted sense of having squandered his life loving an abstraction...
...Played with dreamy ferocity by Gael Garcia Bernal, Octavio gets caught up in a seductive, gangster lifestyle that Gonzalez Inarritu renders through montages set to pulsing Latin rap: dogfights, armed robberies, counting the money...
...Winner of multiple awards at Cannes last year, Amores Perms has been lauded (by the New York Times) as "the first classic of the new decade...
...The chase ends in a fiery crash with a third vehicle, and the balance of the film lays out a triptych of stories (all titled, like short fictions) that radiate outward from this one horrific event...
...What follow are the details of death undoing itself—blood draining upward toward a victim's head, spent shell casings leaping up from the ground...
...Duplicities and red herrings pile up, augmented by the film's reinforcing structures of uncertainty, making for a daunting epistemological game...
...Until afterward, that is...
...Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Amores Perros opens with a terrifying car chase, as two men ferrying a wounded, profusely bleeding dog in the back seat careen through the streets of Mexico City, pursued by an SUV full of gunmen...
...Octavio's story, for instance, takes us into the brutal world of dogfighting, where he tries to fund his fantasy of eloping with Susana...
...Life, Kierkegaard once observed, must be lived forward, but it can only be understood in reverse...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 11
