I watch movies in roughly 30-minute swaths while riding public transportation. This generally works pretty well, as most movies are roughly 90 minutes long and hew to a 3-act structure. It’s like reading chapters of a book. AMORES PERROS is 150 minutes long, with three separate and intersecting stories, and it is simply not conducive to serialized viewing. It needs to be consumed in one large gulp of time, which allows it to cast a cohesive spell.
Of its three tales, the film’s first one had the greatest effect on me. It’s about a young man who’s in love with his abusive brother’s wife and hits upon a scheme to earn some quick dough and run away with her. Things go poorly.
In the second, a man leaves his family for a new love. Things go poorly, no thanks to the young man in tale #1.
The third story follows a homicidal vagrant whom we meet early in story #1. He left his family to become a revolutionary, but (say it with me now) things go poorly.
All three stories give us people swimming against the tides of their love, and wreaking varying degrees of havoc along the way. They’re beautifully done, and I think this movie could have carried me away. If only I had seen it under different circumstances.
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