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"Amores Perros" - movie review


“Amores Perros” or “Love is a Bitch” is a tireless 2 ½ hrs evocation of portent that will haunt you throughout the movie, and well beyond the closing credits. Movie begins with a car accident. With the knowledge of the accident, we are presented the preludes of all the people who find their lives tragically interlinked with the accident. Whether it is the teenager who fights his dog for money in a local betting house to lure his brother’s wife into eloping with him; whether it is the blue collar business man who pays a surly old fellow to kill his brother on account of cheating him in business; whether it is the magazine cover page designer who falls for the model and leaves his wife and children for her, only to be confronted with devastating experiences- movie silently sketches the outlines of a phantasmagoria, dipping the paintbrush (car accident) in three different stories, paints and transforms the hazy outlines of phantasmagoria into solid lines of a nightmarish hound-love.

Movie alludes to the desires and wantons; the teenager, blinded by his desire to run away with his brother’s wife, gets his brother beaten up, coerced and bullied by local thugs. His brother leaves the town with his pregnant wife and a kid, attempts to rob a bank and is killed in the process. teenager himslef is abandaned by his lover, brother's wife, after the accident. with his ribs and bones shattered, body bruised, his dog and money stolen, his best friend dead, he finds himeslf utterly devastated.

A man in his mid thirties is infatuated with a model, buys her a home and lives with her. But the accident throws their relationship asunder-the model loses a leg and the bereaved man hopelessly approaches his ex-wife for words of consolation.

Brothers and business partners are cuffed and presented a sermon by the man who one of them pays to kill the other. Ferocious dog fighting, love for a small puppy dog, and the man with seven dogs- it is not just the accident that brings these people together, but the dogs too. Dogs are gratuitous lovers, in dogs, these people find love. Hysterical and troubled men, ones that are deplorable, and the ones that are deprived of love- all of them, through the accident and the dogs come in contact with each other for once.

Strangers as they are, after the accident, the burly dog is rescued by the old thug; puppy dog becomes the only thing of joy for the new couple; if not for the dog, one of the brothers would have been dead- movie impales your conscience and leaves you with the scars of fatigue. By the end though, nothing changes, viewers will find themselves disturbed enough for a while. As haunting as “Requiem for a dream”

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