Auteur perception of reality in “Amores Perros” and “Los Olvidados” sample essay

Traditionally every director attempts to convey self-image in own movies, which can be embedded in narrative structure, symbolism, visual imagery and many different aspects. Simultaneously, this intention is not connected to the director’s desire to promote his/her own image, rather to deliver main idea of art and author’s own reality through it. But a trace of personal director’s experience can be observed in a movie. Depiction of reality – shocking violence, love on the streets and beyond them, personal ambitions and human animal grudge – can be considered the primary objectives of both directors Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Luis Bunuel, which are acting behind the scenery as agents of own intentions. Such a vivid depiction of reality explains the random scenery change, observed in both movies as well as a great exposure of symbolism.

In his early interviews, Gonzalez Inarritu has suggested that a better English translation for the movie would be "Tough Loves," or "Harsh Loves" (Martin, 2003). In “Amores Perros” the desperate lovers in three intersecting stories are linked to the lives of their dogs. Most of the humans, who suffer terribly, inflict suffering as well. The dogs serve both as companions, mirroring their owners' behavior, and as metaphors for the savagery of modern life. Practically, the sensation of modern life is attained through the richly textured feel of "De La Calle" (Watling, 62). Handheld cameras and steadicams bring us into its characters' worlds. In one tense scene the camera pans quickly back and forth between two people, without cuts, focusing on their faces so that the audience can soak up the smell of dust on T-shirts, sweat on the faces and saliva of dogs (refer to the beginning parts of “Amores Perros”). These methods of visual delivery allow Inarritu to transform the viewer into a participant, performing the function of agent of self! In such a way the director intended to totally involve the audience in the plot of the movie. Gonzalez Inarritu, as an auteur tried to unite the perception of viewers with the action on the screen.

Luis Bunuel does not present a stereotypical, one-dimensional and thus limited image of Mexico City, but introduces his own view of urban metropolis, modern atomic community, teeming with an undernourished peasant class. The police officer criticizes Pedro’s mother and alleges “sometimes I think it is the parents we should arrest.” Being a Mexican social worker, the officer imposes a judgment upon the mother, attempting to place Pedro in a more favorable environment. The clash of obsolete and modern ideologies becomes so eloquent when illiterate mother cannot sign the contract given to her. Her subsequent revelation of being seduced by Pedro’s father discloses the space between these lower and upper class perceptions of reality (the reality Bunuel perceives as well) wherein the former is not as attractive and ordered as the latter. Practically, for Bunuel this community of modern peasant experiencing agricultural downsizing in rural areas constitutes the peculiar reality (Watling,2000). In fact, the reality is embedded in individuals, who are not integrated into city-life, and their inner world is still based on myths, folk, livestock and physical labor. They can’t afford devoting time for self-developing and education as the town-dwellers (Watling,2000). Pursuing own reality, Bunuel has gathered an assortment of “calle” folk - paupers, delinquents, lost children, and parents of degraded morals - and has blended them all together in a vicious and shocking melange of violence, melodrama, coincidence, and irony (Mahar, 21).

Alejandro Inarritu follows the paths of three people whose lives are linked by a car crash. Though the film is divided into separate sections, the stories are interwoven both in the direction, with a character from one story walking through another's scene, and in the editing, in montage cuts that juxtapose different narrative threads. Practically, this narrative style, Inarritu’s trademark as noticed in recent “21 Grams,” serves not to confuse but rather to bind the film together. The three stories intersect literally, and devastatingly, with a car crash on a city street (Martin, 391). A blond woman lies bleeding and screaming in one car. A couple of teenage boys are trapped in the twisted wreckage of the other. One witness to the carnage, a gray-bearded street person with a haunted face, goes to help the kids, spots an injured rottweiler in the back seat and decides instead to save the dog. From that moment on, the film moves back and forth in time, revealing and recapitulating - and showing the accident from three points of view - until the separate stories become borderless panels in one vast, tumultuous panorama of urban life. The director managed to provide a more vivid description of reality uniting several various people in one accident.

The movement of “Los Olvidados” is depicted through the conflict between the two main characters, “the innately decent but demoralized Pedro and the vicious, amoral Jaibo” (Magill, 27). Pedro continuously emerges from a dark side of Jaibo and out of other unfortunate circumstances, and eventually becomes good, though Bunuel remains cynical, denying Pedro the opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of others. However, from the critical point of view, this affirmation is ultimately unnecessary. Simultaneously, Bunuel places a burden of struggle on every character in the movie, and struggle results in constant movement between good and evil, innocent and immoral. Being in a moment, movement to evil, of anger Ojitos lifts a rock to attack the blind man Don Carmelo. Ironically, the character one might perceive as the most harmless character, the blind Don Carmelo, “lecherous, petty, and Fascist, the crust old misanthrope is forever wishing the children dead and telling them their fathers were right in abandoning them” (Magill, 31).

In “Amores Perros” as a central character, which he certainly is, the rottweiler, Cofi, gets to play in the film's most controversial scenes - horrifying dog fights, with substantial purses, held in clandestine venues that include a drained swimming pool. For Cofi's young owner, Octavio, the purses are an irresistible draw; Octavio dreams of taking the woman he loves, his sister-in-law Susana, far away from the city's squalor and the tyranny of her husband, and his brother, a petty crook named Ramiro (Watling,2000).

The film leaps swiftly, seemingly effortlessly, from one level of Mexican society to another. If Octavio and his buddies have been struggling near the bottom, the blond woman, a supermodel known as Valeria, has been flourishing at the top. Her part of the triptych illustrates the precariousness of life for Mexico's rich along with its poor; the segment is a fable of romantic dreams destroyed by chance (Watling,2000).

Every one of the performances in this densely populated drama rings resoundingly true, but Emilio Echevarria, as the haunted street person, El Chivo (the goat), takes us far beyond naturalism into realms of Stygian fury and anguishing beauty (Johnson, 58). The story of El Chivo seems to be the most remarkable of all. The rescue of the dog helped him revise his attitude to life and gave him a hope. El Chivo's soliloquy to his estranged daughter's answering machine is almost too painful to bear, though audience might wish a few traces of sentimentality had been cut from the text. Once an idealistic revolutionary, then a terrorist, El Chivo has become a derelict hit man. Yet his story, the most remarkable of all, proves to be one of reconciliation and redemption, and the instrument of that change is the dog he rescued from the car crash, the innocently lethal rottweiler. "Amores Perros" has it all, brilliance and bite(Watling,2000).

From the critical point of view, “Los Olvidados” is considered to be one of the harshest, genuine movies about poverty. Practically, having spent several months on the streets of Mexico City in shabbiest clothes, Bunuel later indicated that many of the film’s characters were unfiltered portrayals of people he met in the street. The director projected his personal experience on the screen. Once the film was produced, it was accused by politicians and other critics as the worst kind of publicity Mexico could get (Smith, 1991). Indeed, “Los Olvidados” realism becomes surrealistically surprising. Author’s surrealistic intentions surface in two peculiar scenes – Pedro’s guilty dream sequence just after Julian’s death, and Jaibo’s death. Simultaneously, Bunuel’s surrealism is accompanied with the extensive utilization of deep symbolism. During his guilty dream sequence, Pedro “wakes up” in the middle of the night and watches a white chicken floating to the ground. He looks under the bed and sees Julian’s corpse, in mad smile, shaking his head. Chicken feathers float about. Chicken and feathers symbolize the miserable existence of the folk. From this controversial point of view, the parallels can be traced into “Amores Perros” where animal love clearly possesses humanistic image. Throughout his work auteur is guided as an agent of own intentions and this is the significant reason why the images of chicken and eyes of dogs directly refer to human faces and characters: practically, it is not always possible to depict the reality solely with existing images (it has been considered to be a prerogative of Hollywood), and in the Mexican world of intentions and surrealism, the reality sparkles and bites itself.

Bibliography

1. Magill’s Survey of Cinema. Los Olvidados. Salem Press. 1995

2. Smith, M. “Bunuel’s “Los Olvidados” a Brutal Masterpiece”. Los Angeles Times. Friday, October 18,1991

3. Mahar, T. “Los Olvidados.” Oregonian. Friday, December 11, 1992 Section: Arts and Entertainment

4. Watling J. “Amores Perros” spearheads new age of Mexican cinema. Business Mexico. Mexico City: Aug 2000. Vol. 10, Iss. 8

5. Martin, M. New Latin American Cinema, Ed. vol.1, Wayne State University Press, 2003

6. Johnson, B. Variations on Vengeance: A Mexican takes us unawares. Maclean’s. Toronto: Dec 1, 2003. Vol. 116, Iss. 48
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