The third story is pitched as a suspenseful psychological thriller. The model's section is a cruel moral tale of the unexpected, with the tension cranked up mercilessly throughout it is photographed as a picture of a smooth, upmarket world in which the real troubles go on beneath the surface (under the floorboards, in fact). The first story is hard, low-life realism, shot in lurid colours and edited as a frenetic blur. Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga Jordan are dazzlingly adept storytellers they've managed to shoehorn three genres coherently into one film. And finally, a dog-loving terrorist turned tramp and hitman prepares for his latest mission.Įven at two hours, 33 minutes, there's barely a moment wasted. In the second story, a model moves into a luxury flat with her middle-aged married lover, but things go horribly wrong when her pampered pooch disappears under the floorboards. Hoping to buy them a better life, he enters his dog in fights, where it proves to be the bloodiest battler around. In story one, set at the bottom of the poverty ladder, a teenage mother is courted by her hoodlum husband's kid brother. This isn't just a facile dog-eat-dog parable: the canine theme is a cleverly worked-out device for knitting together three stories that intersect in the car crash that starts the film. The dogs form a parallel to human life on the streets of Mexico City, where people all too easily revert to teeth-baring rage. Even though the shots of the dog-fights are mercifully brief and ungloating, they are enough to unsettle you even if you're no dog lover (and after a week trying not to step on the micro-chihuahuas on the Croisette, festival-goers tend not to be). The first third is set in the sordid, blood-steeped dog-fighting rings of low-life Mexico City, where slavering, snapping hounds hurl themselves at each other in ear-ripping combat. It's a film of extreme violence, among both humans and dogs. This year's Critics Week hit so far is a Mexican film - Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's debut feature Amores Perros (it could be translated as Dog Love, although the press release goes for Love's A Bitch). That's the rather scrappily publicised section that most people get to explore only after they've trawled the Competition, the variable Un Certain Regard section and the Directors' Fortnight - the festival's most public-friendly chunk. One, however, has turned up in the nick of time, although it is unaccompanied by any press furore, largely because it is hidden away in the small but selective Critics' Week. I t didn't look as though Cannes was going to have a true controversy this year, or even any film about which to get really hot under the collar.
0 kommentar(er)
