Modern Mexico Unleashed

Picture a Mexico where young punks blare rock en espanol from their GMC trucks, yuppies drive BMWs to fancy hotels for afternoon trysts with their mistresses, thugs with spiked hair hold up local supermarkets, vicious dogs prowl the streets looking for prey, eking out a meager existence in their quest for survival.

No strolling mariachis. No cactuses. No sombreroed bandidos drinking tequila. No Indian peasants smiling meekly-images of Mexico usually seen on the big screen.

The modern Mexico-with Internet access and cable television, and inhabitants who have lost love, experienced tragic deaths and redeemed themselves from their sins-is what director AlejandroGonzalez Inarritu wanted to capture in his first film, “Amores Perros” (which literally means dog love but is a popular way of saying love can be a downer).

The film, which opens Friday in Los Angeles, grabs you by the throat, according to many people in Hollywood who have seen the film. It is a film that demands the international entertainment industry wake up to Mexico’s role in contemporary life.

From the opening scene of panicked young punks driving through the streets of Mexico City, a chase that ends in an explosive car wreck, the viewer is in for an intense ride. The three-hour film interweaves four stories, playing them in their past, present and future, in a fast-action style, while it serves as a meditation on the loneliness of modern society and on human frailty. Most controversial is Gonzalez’s use of graphic dogfights as a metaphor for the dehumanization of society. But his background as a commercials director and his love of literature combine for a modern, very American-style action movie grounded in a strong narrative more similar to a novel than a film.

The film’s critical success so far is perhaps surprising considering its violence and intensity. It was the first Mexican movie to be nominated for a foreign-language Oscar in more than 25 years. It has received awards at film festivals around the world, including the International Critics’ Week Grand Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Gonzalez has found himself the center of attention. He is being courted by the major studios. Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar and Jonathan Demme have sought him out to tell him they loved his movie. The Mexican consulates in New York and Los Angeles have hosted screenings and cocktail parties, proudly showing off a film that 30 years ago likely would have been banned by the government for its content.

It has almost been too much to take in. The 37-year-old director now finds himself wondering which path he will follow: Will he go to Hollywood? Will he stay in Mexico? Will he try to find the best of all worlds and make movies all over the world?

One thing is certain: He is a long way from where he started.

“I had to fight against a lot of taboos: being Mexican, being a first-time director and coming from [a] commercials background,” Gonzalez said over lunch at a Century City hotel. “I think the movie broke some stereotypes.”

Many in Hollywood were impressed by the film’s vitality.

“My reaction in seeing this movie was, ‘This guy has the skills to become a big director in our business,”’ said Lorenzo di Bonaventura, president of worldwide theatrical production at Warner Bros. “He has a chance to play on a global scale, not just as a regional director. You don’t get to see this level of filmmaking very often.”

Producer Mark Johnson, who is also chairman of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences foreign-language film committee, said the film’s nomination was a turning point for the traditionally stodgy selection panel.

“I was particularly impressed that we [nominated] ‘Amores Perros’ because it is such a difficult movie-it’s an in-your-face movie,” he said. “I think this shows that there is a vibrancy and a nonconformism going on in [the Mexican film industry]. It demonstrates that what is going on in Mexico is on a world-class level.”

To Johnson, the best movies come from directors with a very personal and defined sense of what they want to say. Like the work of young directors who preceded him-Danny Boyle (‘Trainspotting’), Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights”) and Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”)-Gonzalez’s film was like a primal scream, demonstrating a raw talent for storytelling on the big screen.

His passion to make a film had been bubbling for a while. Though he made a successful living from commercials, he was frustrated. After he dedicated more than 10 years to advertising, the industry’s superficiality had begun to wear him down.

“I was filming in Paris and New York with big budgets-I was a fortunate but unhappy man,” he said. “That is the hardest thing to be because when you have a reason to be unhappy it’s easier. When things are seemingly going really well and you don’t have an apparent reason to be unhappy, it is horrible. Advertising can give you a lot of money, but it steals your soul.”

One day in 1998, he read a book by Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter of “Amores Perros,” and decided to meet him. They were introduced by a mutual friend, and, Gonzalez says, “it was like meeting a long-lost brother.”

They met one afternoon to discuss screenplay ideas. It was there, over Argentine steaks and beer in one of Mexico’s trendiest neighborhoods, that the idea for “Amores Perros” was born.

After months of fierce discussions, they ironed out the story and its protagonists.

“Our concept was to say something about this city through love and pain and to make a portrait of this very complex mosaic that is Mexico City,” Gonzalez said.

Indeed, the Mexico City portrayed is rarely seen on film. Gonzalez took great pains to convey the city’s contradictions, its brutality, its poverty and its richness. It is, after all, a city of 8 million built on a lake bed of what was once the great Aztec empire. The city is now suffering from an epidemic of violence that affects all social classes-from a booming kidnapping industry to rogue taxicab drivers to holdups in the city’s best restaurants.

Gonzalez captured the bleak aspects of Mexico City so well that tourism officials from the Mexican Consulate in New York privately told him no one would visit the city again. Some Americans who have seen the movie confirm those fears.

But Gonzalez dismisses this as a knee-jerk reaction to a film that portrays only a part of the city’s daily life.

“It makes me so sad and angry when Americans ask me, ‘Is that really how Mexico City is? I don’t think I could go there to visit.’ That is like me saying, ‘Well, kids in America are shooting each other in schools and so I would never send my kids to an American school,”’ he said. “It’s part of the reality. The film captures part of the violence and intensity that exists in Mexico. I hope the movie leaves people asking questions and with reflections. That is what art should be about.”

Gonzalez speaks in a fast, clipped Spanish with a deep voice further deepened by nights out about town celebrating after the Oscars. (The film lost to Taiwan’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”) He is hung over from lack of sleep and the adrenaline rush. Called “Negro” (Black One) by his friends for his deep-brown skin color, black hair, thick eyebrows and dark brown eyes, Gonzales gives the impression that life never just passes him by. He is sharply in tune with the present, although his sense of the future is imbued with a very Spanish sense of mortality and fate.

“Whether you are rich or poor or American or Mexican, we are all the same; we can all die tomorrow in a car wreck,” he said. “It’s like that phrase one of the characters says in [the ‘Amores Perros’] funeral scene, which my father used to tell me all the time. ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.’ Humans have this need to control and to make ourselves less vulnerable. But we are very vulnerable.”

Our vulnerability is painfully seen through the film’s protagonists.

There is El Chivo, the 1960s ex-revolutionary who, after a long spell in prison, attempts to return to his family, only to discover his daughter was told he had died. He withdraws from society, preferring the company of stray dogs to humans. In the end he tries to make amends with his daughter, who sees him only as a homeless stranger. Valeria, a model who is horribly disfigured in a car wreck, must leave behind the vanity of her former life and confront its tragic turns. There is Gustavo, who hires El Chivo to assassinate his brother, Luis, so he can run the family business. Then, in the leading story, there is Octavio, who falls in love with his brother’s wife. Hoping to make enough cash to run way with her, Octavio enters his beloved pet, a bull mastiff, in dogfights.

The film has been compared by some American journalists to “Pulp Fiction,” but Gonzalez disagrees. They are very different films, he says. Indeed, “Amores Perros” has few moments of levity or the kind of over-the-top drama that makes it acceptable to laugh. If there is any humor, it is deeply buried in a very dark place.

Yet, Gonzalez does not see his film as nihilistic.

“I think it’s redeeming,” he said. “The characters go through a very painful learning process that in the end makes them better people. It’s not a happy ending. I don’t believe life has a happy ending. Life is yin and yang, it’s black and white, it’s sweet and sour.”

What is more important to him was showing the theme of paternity in the film. As the father of two, he has found that family unity and, conversely, the impact of family dysfunction are topics of interest. His characters are men who leave and return, men who become something they never thought they could be: the modern-day equivalent of Cain and Abel, brother betraying brother.

Gonzalez felt it necessary to show the violence of betrayal, fate and abandonment. To make his point even more powerful, the violence ricochets off humans into the lives of their pets. Gonzalez says he used only 18 seconds of dogfighting scenes, and adds that no animals were hurt in its production. Gonzalez says it appears as though the dogs are fighting, but actually they are wearing muzzles, play-fighting as they launch into each other. The overall impact feels longer because the scenes are so jarring.

“We didn’t want to show frivolous violence,” he said. “That kind of violence invites a sense of cool and hipness. Tom Cruise can shoot up dozens of people and in the end he gets the most beautiful girl. We wanted to show the consequences of violence, for the perpetrator and the victim. Violence generates violence and causes pain.”

Gonzalez is somewhat perplexed by the reaction many Americans have had to the dogfight scenes. Few people have commented on the violence committed against humans in his film-or in other movies.

“Look at ‘Gladiator’-how many violent scenes are in there? How much blood and guts in that movie? And yet it won the Academy Award,” he said. “That tells you a little bit about this symptom of dehumanization among industrialized nations. People can watch Schwarzenegger movies, they can watch nightly news and shootings. Yet you present them with one wounded animal and they go nuts. We have lost perspective.”

Now that the Oscar season is over, Gonzalez is grateful to return to work. He is writing his second film, “21 Grams.” He says it will also be a meditation on life and fate-21 grams is what a human being loses in weight when he dies, perhaps, some suggest, the weight of one’s soul. But it has been difficult focusing on his movie when so much is going on around him. At times he has felt a little overwhelmed and sought out fellow filmmakers for counsel. Kimberly Peirce, who went through a similar experience last year with the explosive critical success of “Boys Don’t Cry,” has been his “therapist.”

“I told him, ‘Get back to work,’ ” she said by telephone from New York. “Steven Soderbergh told me that last year. You do a year of press and it’s really seductive and tiring, but you are not doing work. Getting back to that space very quickly is really necessary.”

Will he go to Hollywood? It will depend on the project and the relationship he can form with a studio. Whether he can find that delicate balance between a director’s personal vision and the commercial demands of a studio-as Soderbergh has managed so well-remains a mystery.

“I’m not interested in making a two-hour commercial, with a formula and for a target audience,” he said. “If I could find a way to do a project where I have creative freedom, great. Otherwise I don’t have a need. I’m not moved by big-name actors, money or by a need to break into Hollywood. I’m moved by the story.”