The Brooklyn Rail

The photographer Stephen Shore once famously remarked that if you are going to take a picture, put a car in it. Cars are a cultural time stamp, an economic barometer, but also, in the film Amores Perros, the center of the universe. Cars and their intersection are where timelines collide, chance and necessity intersect, plans are overturned, and destinies are rewritten. A car crash stands at the center of the vast and elaborate re-presentation of the groundbreaking film by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, staged by the director himself at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Twenty-five years after the film was released in 2000—and according to many critics inaugurated the so-called Mexican new wave in cinema—Iñárritu felt compelled to revisit the million feet of film archived at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, including tests, outtakes, and even extra video footage shot by his crew. As he describes it, plunging back into that mass of fragments was a truly mind-bending experience, a confrontation not merely with his own past work but with the dozens or even hundreds of films that might have been.

But now they are—or at least the suggestion of them. In six rooms at Prada, Iñárritu arranged anywhere from one to three 35-millimeter film projectors, running footage he had spliced together and given new soundtracks, often ambient or other soundscapes. Each of the rooms focus on a different scene or set of scenes and their variants. Angles change, points of view change, cutting and sequencing change, repetitions change. If this sounds like an academic exercise for cinephiles, its presentation in an art museum signals something else. It takes its place alongside probing art-world examinations of cinema that include Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). What emerges at Prada is independent of the released film (and yet not): a labyrinthine examination of time, narrative, memory, and the unconscious, whose impact is very different (and yet not) from its finished relative.

To understand what happens at Prada—and the other venues the exhibition will visit—a brief refresher on Amores Perros is in order. The film tells three interconnecting stories of characters from various strata of Mexican society: the tension between two brothers—the older, Ramiro, a stickup artist, the younger, Octavio, making money at dogfights—over the affections of a young woman, Susana, married to Ramiro and the mother of his child; the decline of a fashion model after an accident derails her career; and the stalking of a businessman by a hitman, who is both a vagrant and an ex-guerilla. All three stories come together at the scene of the accident, in a sequence that begins the film and recurs throughout. Violence runs through the stories like the line running through a dollar sign. In this Mexico, money—too much or not enough to live on—corrupts, and the only way out of it, Iñárritu suggests, is to do what the vagrant assassin does at the end of the film after renouncing the job he has been hired to do: give the money away and just keep walking, without hope or expectation.

When the film debuted, it was compared with the work of Quentin Tarantino, but its violence is not stylized,.Its colors are grainy and raw, not pop, and its vision—given the horrors that were to unfold in Mexico over the next two decades—seems the opposite of exaggerated: prescient. Iñárritu’s world, elaborated in Amores Perros and subsequent films such as 21 Grams and Babel, is one of unintended consequences and ripple effects, in which fate is disguised as coincidence and character as accident.

At Prada, it is as if the director blew up his own world in order to meditate on the fragments. Gone are the connecting plots and original soundtrack. The characters appear unintroduced in the middle of whatever action, and that action is played over and over, often from different points of view. Many of the clips are introduced by a clapboard, from which we learn that the film’s shooting title was Amor y Rabia [Love and Rage]. This never lets us forget that what we are seeing is a constructed reality, with many versions, in some sense all of them provisional. These include the ones we put together in our heads from room-to-room, and what we might remember from having seen the finished film. Particular comparisons are too numerous and intricate to spell out, and all of them are fascinating. That said, some are revelatory, but in different ways.

The exhibition begins with the scene that in fact closes the movie, with the vagrant hitman, played by the superb Emilio Echevarria, walking alone with his dog: the one surviving animal from all the violent dog fights and from the hitman’s own menagerie. He faces an open plain, an empty landscape. In some outtakes he has the dog, in others he is alone. We see him in other clips in the exhibition wheeling a shopping cart, tending his dogs, threatening his kidnap victim, and cutting his hair and nails. Without his backstory, without an explanation of how he acquires the dog and where he is headed, he appears as an apparition, mysterious and suggestive: a rootless, wordless prophet of the underclass with a gun.

The car crash might be thought of as an elaborate form of cultural PTSD. Metaphoric, of course, but shot from so many angles, it takes on a life of its own. We see the production team attempting to choreograph the scene, but it feels out of control. It comes to seem as if the entire city, if not the country, is trapped in a concussive instant, pummeled again and again. The scene is separated from its context: the attempted escape of Octavio (Gael García Bernal, in his first true star turn) after stabbing his dog-fighting rival. He and his best friend are trying to save the dog that the rival has just shot. Octavio’s driving, as he dodges gunfire from the gang, makes Steve McQueen in Bullitt look like the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, while his friend frantically tries to stanch the dog’s bleeding. Fernando Llanos, the crew’s storyboard artist, shot video in the backseat of the pursuing pickup truck, a point of view the final version could not accommodate but an unsettling reversal here. The nightmarish intensity of the bleeding animal seems to go on forever. At Prada, we are never sure whether the animal or anyone else in the car survives.

Lyricism appears as sudden and unbidden as violence. Bernal contemplates the lights on the ceiling of his bedroom as if it were an immanence, a place elsewhere he will never attain. His approach to Susana is the suggestive insistence of his hand between her thighs. Outtakes defuse the tension—it’s all rehearsed—but repeating the scene transforms it into a pornographic obsession.

Repetition without closure. Middles without beginnings or ends. Violence without motive. Desire without regard. Tenderness without effect. The scenes leave us adrift and looking obsessively for meaning and redemption from the trauma. Iñárritu can’t seem to seem to find it either, and that adds a deeply melancholy undertone to the whole. Or perhaps it’s deliberate, that irresolution, an artist’s comment on the fiction that his own finished work promotes: the fiction of order, coherence, and a solid place to stand.