Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Amores Perros essay contains spoilers. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s 2000 film features Emilio Echevarría, Gael García Bernal and Goya Toledo. Check out film essays, along with cast/character articles, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

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This column has thus far focused largely on films that, to put it simply, I enjoy. Great crime cinema — great genre cinema, in general — is often deeply tied to location, setting and geography. Even when a sense of specificity is severed or lost, usually as a result of budget shortcomings, the best filmmakers find a way to make that severance and vagueness a strength. So, what happens when a filmmaker sets their film in an absolutely distinct and unique city but ignores its contours and colors entirely?

Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga made a major splash in Cannes in 2000 with Amores Perros. As a 154-minute debut feature about three interlocking stories across Mexico City all connected by a car crash at the center, the film was praised at the time for its gritty realism and energetic filmmaking — platitudes which didn’t make sense then and certainly don’t now, with Iñárritu solidifying himself as one of the most po-faced, self-serious and dullest filmmakers of the 21st century.

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’

Amores Perros is almost entirely disinterested in its central location. It feels like a film made not to speak truth to Mexican audiences, but to present a hyperreal version of Mexico for international audiences. The litany of gang violence, poverty, killing and general abuse of both humans and animals — while certainly rooted in truth for many Mexicans — remains particularly appealing imagery for non-Mexican audiences. Let’s call it Gringo Cinema. 

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’

It’s a fate that’s befallen plenty of other Latin American national cinemas. Witness the glitz and acclaim bombarded upon the Brazilian film City of God (2002), which premiered in Cannes just two years after Amores Perros. A fine film it may be, but that too is Gringo Cinema, not intended for Brazilians themselves, evidenced by the fact that the film’s director, Fernando Mereilles, very quickly decamped to Hollywood to direct tired Oscar bait. One can level the same criticism at Iñárritu, who did not direct another film in Mexico after Amores Perros until Bardo in 2022. The films that broke these directors in the international world both fixate on suffering and inequality in their home cities; a visual image of suffering gleefully consumed by outside audiences. And oh boy, does Iñárritu know how to deliver on suffering.

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Brawl in Cell Block 99’

Suffering may well be the only thing that Iñárritu understands how to deliver. All throughout Amores Perros, everyone suffers, especially the dogs — as glib a metaphor as ever for humankind’s lack of empathy. Across the three hyperlinked stories, scrappy youngster Octavio (Gael García Bernal in his breakthrough international role) suffers as a witness to the violence in his rough neighborhood, attempting to save his sister-in-law from an abusive relationship. Amores Perros’ middle section sees the upper-class model Valeria (Goya Toledo) languishing depressed in her isolated apartment after the film’s central car crash. The final section sees the mysterious hitman El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría) suffer the sins of his past while inflicting plenty of suffering on others as a result of the day job. 

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Sound of Freedom’

Each protagonist and their immediate circle are defined not by their personalities or character traits but rather by their capacity for suffering. Iñárritu and Arriaga use this as a cheap shortcut towards dramatic tension, rather than staging context for it. Amores Perros earned comparisons at the time to Pulp Fiction (1994) because of its hyperlinked narrative and fragmented chronology, but Quentin Tarantino keenly understood the appeal of, well, pulp fiction. He wrapped his obsessive genre movie knowledge into rhythmic dialogue and a commanding filmmaking style, pushing just the right balance between preposterous and believable.

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘The Killer’

Iñárritu and Arriaga take three stories which are essentially pulp in nature: the hood gangster film, a telenovela soap and a laconic hitman movie, respectively, and play each one entirely straight, as if it were dead-faced realism. The tension between melodramatic material and realist aesthetics is a rich vein to strike, but it’s drained of any tension in Amores Perros, seemingly by Iñárritu’s belief that he has some worthwhile insights into these character’s lives, forgetting that he needs to paint in the background details before he can foreground why the suffering matters.

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘The Killer’

But what about Amores Perros’ setting — the vibrant, sprawling metropolis that is Mexico City? The city proper consists of nine million people, and the wider metropolitan area has around 22 million residents. That three previously unrelated characters become so interlinked in Amores Perros — both before and after the central car crash — can be written off as good ol’ fashioned movie magic, but one never gets a sense that these individuals emerged from Mexico City, or that they’ve meaningfully interacted with it in any way. 

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Pain Hustlers’

Inequality plays a massive role in Amores Perros, and Mexico City, in this sense, is not much different from many Latin American cities, where the gap between rich and poor feels insurmountable. But does this inequality meaningfully impact the lives of Iñárritu’s protagonists? Other than the fact that Octavio gets involved in dog-fighting as a way out of poverty, it is minimal. But the consequences ought to be there, front and center. Character interactions across class barriers (even fleetingly) ought to enrich the film. But the protagonists and villains only mention in passing the urban topography of the city and its rampant inequality: “cars do get stolen here,” remarks the hitman to a rich client who visits his shack.

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Drive My Car’

The only place where Iñárritu prioritizes the city’s topography in Amores Perros is perhaps the respective living quarters of each protagonist, which form a vital part of what little personality they are given by the script. Octavio’s family home is cramped and stuffy, shared by his brother’s family and his mother. Teenagehood stickers still dot the wall, so it’s no wonder Bernal’s character dreams of flying the nest. Valeria’s high-rise apartment may be elegant, modernist and spotless, but it isolates her post-accident when she cannot walk. Just as troublesome is the poor workmanship, with a shoddy floor that caves in at random. Meanwhile, El Chivo’s shack is dingy and visibly smelly but secluded and private, befitting of a man who’s given up on his humanity.

Amores Perros Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘The Humans’

The details exist in Amores Perros at the edge of the frame, capable of bringing a rich vividness to a melodramatic OTT story. That these details are so disentangled from the film as a whole is not evidence of a novelistic, literate approach to filmmaking, but a director with a wealth of material they are unable to grapple with and shape. If great directors — or even just halfway good ones — can shape location and setting into key parts of a story, a poor director will continually miss the wood for the trees. The details may well be there in the text, but they won’t be highlighted or elaborated on. Perhaps it is easy to give gringos what they want. But I guess it is easy to get lost in Mexico City.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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