With this deft-handed and clever-minded auteur, who could say bollocks to Alenjandro Gonzales Inarritu when he demands your attention with such electricity of his debut filmmaking? Of course, after having watched his wrenchingly brilliant sophomore, 21 Grams, an arguably better film than his debut toil, you couldn't resist anything from Inarritu and what he has to offer.

Amores Perros, when translated to English means "Love's a Bitch", tells three interconnected stories about humans who grapple for their lives, their affections, and their doomed existence - oh, and their love for dogs too, makes it more an animalistic ride, if you get the affinity to the movie's title. The first story tells us about "Octavio and Susanna" and as this was Inarritu's film, we are being greeted with a beginning that's supposed to be located somewhere at the ending of the film, just like his other films. It's his trademark, believe me. Anyway, about the first story, Gael Garcia Bernal stars as Octavio who cares much about his brother's dog than his own brother Ramiro, who secretly does an inside job and robbery to the grocery store he's working in. Yet, Octavio harbours a secret too: he's in love with his brother's wife, Susanna, and much more than that, he's obsessed with his brother's dog Cofi and it led him into an underworld where dogfights were held. When he earned so much money during the dogfights, since Cofi was a champion dog, he bribes Susanna to runaway with him, away from the abusive Ramiro. He then wakes up one day with Susanna gone, also Ramiro, with his own money gone too. Soon, due to desperation, he commits to a last dogfight which led Cofi at the brink of life, and due set in a car crash that would change the lives of two people including him.

Inarritu uses the car crash (no, this is not like 2005's Oscar Best Picture winner, Crash, but likely almost the same story device used with the connecting stories) as a tool to make his story evolve. The car crash affects two other people, the one a former model, who had her leg smashed due to the car crash, in which leads us to the next story "Daniel and Valeria", a more subdued and slightly ridiculous story of a man who left his own family to live with a model. He bought an apartment for her, and almost had given up all his life for this lady.And when their dog had gone into a hole in their floorboard, their lives became incessantly a turmoil and messy with lots of fights and argument.

Humour me.

The car crash also affected another life, which enters the last story of the film, "El Chivo and Maru", a tale about a dog-loving beggar but a hired assassin at the same time. He rescues Cofi, Octavio's dog, from the accident and healed him and sooner found out that as the dog was trained so much in the dogfighting, he had killed the other dogs. For the most inspiring part, he was hired to kill a man, which led us to a twist I had expected.

This film relies so much on the story that some might find it pretty boring. It requires so much attention and patience to walk with Inarritu with his journey and the story that he wanted to tell us. Although, it's a good film and it conveys a message about the dooms of men, about redemption, love, sacrifice and all other dark vestiges of humanity, it does not swoon over to the pinnacles of 21 Grams. It's a dark, interesting film, and it showcases Inarritu's passion in making not just movies, but films.

Rating: B+