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A car crash makes three lives occupy the same few seconds in Amores perros. It does not make those lives equal. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2000 Mexico City film, written by Guillermo Arriaga, moves among Octavio, Daniel and El Chivo. The collision joins their stories; the choices available to each man remain sharply different. That gap is where the film’s portrait of the city begins.
Octavio wants to run away with Susana, his brother’s wife. Cannes’s film record says he turns his dog Cofi into a means of raising the money. It is a bleak conversion: an animal’s body becomes a wager on a young man’s future. Octavio’s longing is recognizable, but the plan asks someone else to absorb its cost. Gael García Bernal plays him, and the film’s 2025 Cannes anniversary account recalls how this debut brought both Bernal and Iñárritu to wider attention. Their later fame is part of the film’s history. It is no substitute for what the story says about desperation.
Daniel leaves his wife and daughters for Valeria, a model. El Chivo works as a contract killer and carries regret about abandoning his daughter, according to Mexico’s cultural film catalog. These are not matching versions of one moral lesson. Daniel can imagine a new domestic life; Octavio tries to buy an exit; El Chivo has already spent years living with an exit he chose. The crash places them on the same map without smoothing away the differences in money, age and obligation.
The film’s dogs complicate any easy account of who deserves sympathy. Cannes describes three intertwined narratives involving men and dogs. Cofi is made useful to Octavio; that use exposes how quickly affection can become possession when a person feels cornered. Yet treating the dogs as symbols alone would repeat the characters’ mistake. They are living creatures inside human schemes. The title Amores perros refuses a clean division between love and harm, and the structure keeps returning that problem to different households.
Cannes celebrated the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025, including its return in Cannes Classics. Anniversaries tend to fix a film as a milestone: the breakthrough, the new wave, the international arrival. Amores perros is more troublesome than a milestone. Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography and Gustavo Santaolalla’s music, both credited in the Mexican film catalog, belong to a work that made Mexico City impossible to reduce to a skyline or a single disaster. Its people meet at an intersection. They leave it carrying different burdens.