Amores Perros · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Amores Perros declares its allegiances from its opening frames: Rodrigo Prieto's camera — held at body height, tilting into corners before committing, shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm to deliberately imperfect effect — announces a vérité / direct cinema strategy consciously borrowed from Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, where the same technical procedure had grafted newsreel grain onto theatrical ambition. But Iñárritu's film isn't merely stylistically restless; its three-panel structure — a working-class dogfighter, a wrecked supermodel, a vagrant assassin — is itself an exercise in montage as moral argument. The car crash doesn't resolve into convergence; it is dispersed across the film's length in fragments, each recurrence resetting the ethical coordinates, forcing us to see the same collision as a class document, the same instant of destruction experienced across the full vertical range of a stratified city. The editing doesn't build momentum so much as accumulate weight, turning genre machinery — crime thriller, ironic melodrama, parable — into a sustained indictment of how desire and violence flow into each other. Underlying all three strands is what Deleuze would call the impulse-image: a Buñuelian originary world of degraded drives, where the fighting dogs stand in for humans unable to sustain love without corruption. That moral grammar was first mapped onto Mexico City's streets in Los Olvidados, and Iñárritu inherits Buñuel's refusal of redemption outright, wrapping it in a formal urgency that makes the crash feel less like a plot device than an inevitable gravitational collapse.