01 · 09 · 25

Emilio Echevarría (1944-2025) and the 25th Anniversary of AMORES PERROS

Rafael Aviña

In early July of the year 2000, some months after President Fox’s euphoria, line 3 of the Mexico City subway didn't have the crowds or the severe problems it has today. I entered the car at Etiopía heading to Ciudad Universitaria and then I noticed, a few meters away from me, the actor Emilio Echevarría, who was trying to pass the time with a magazine. From the corner of his eye, he discovered that I was looking at him and he smiled. Two weeks before, Amores perros, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, had been released with huge success, and I decided to express my admiration for his work.

“The good thing is that no one recognizes me except for the beard and the long, dirty hair,” he told me, making reference to his role as El Chivo. He said goodbye, I believe, in Miguel Ángel de Quevedo. In the short time that we spoke, Echevarría conveyed to me an enormous sense of warmth and, despite his exceptional performance, he seemed to me even shy and discrete. He took another car to eternity leaving a series of brilliant and little-known characters of the same caliber, such as the lonely mature man of Valentina Leduc's remarkable short film: Un volcán con lava de hielo, or the nullified husband in Bathroom Intimacy, by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. Without forgetting other striking roles in films such as: Morir en el Golfo, Novia que te vea, Y tu mamá también —as Diego Luna’s father—, Life Kills, De Mesmer, con amor o Té para dos, The Night Buffalo, El mar muerto, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Colosio (in the role of Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios) or that great performance in A Monster with a Thousand Heads, including his international breakthrough with: Die Another Day and The Alamo, as Antonio López de Santa Ana.

Not bad for a public accountant that around 1975 decided to leave his profession (he was in charge of the accounting of an area of Televisa and also of the mythical Video Club Zafra) to pursue theater, following the suggestion of José Luis Ibáñez (Las dos Elenas, Las cautivas) under the command of figures such as Ibáñez himself, Otto Minera, Juan José Gurrola, Ludwik Margules and others, to make the leap to cinema in 1984. Of course, it remains for posterity his character of ex-guerrilla fighter and later hit man who abandons his wife and daughter (played by his real-life daughter, Lourdes Echevarría) to live as a homeless next to several stray dogs and give a “biblical” lesson to the half-brothers played by Jorge Salinas and Rodrigo Murray in Amores perros, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of its release, under the command of González Iñárritu, who also directed him in Babel.

Since his time as a Communications student at Universidad Iberoamericana, Alejandro González Iñárritu was a restless, creative, exigent, persevering and controlling youth, who was always on the search for opportunities. He went to the radio station WFM, along with his friend Martín Hernández, to audition for a broadcasting job, which was cast by Charo Fernández. Two years later, at the age of 25, Iñarritú became the General Director of WFM, one of the most original and successful FM stations.

In the mid-eighties, “El Negro” [Iñárritu's nickname] composed music for some sex comedies by Alberto Rojas “El Caballo” and action films by director Hernando Name. Later, when he joined Televisa, he completely changed the image of Canal 5 and directed and wrote the medium-length film Detrás del dinero (1995), starring Miguel Bosé, and the short film El timbre (1996). At the same time, he founded his production company Z Films, dedicated entirely to commercials, until, after almost four years and supposedly 36 different treatments of a script written by Guillermo Arriaga, González Iñárritu debuted on the big screen with Amores perros, which then became the film with the most awards including Cannes, Bafta, the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, and several Ariel Awards, including that of Opera Prima.

Amores perros would put in the eye of the storm the young actor Gael García Bernal, the entire production team and Mexican cinema in general, and would take González Iñárritu directly to Hollywood, to film the short film Powder Keg (2001), with Clive Owen and Stellan Skarsgård, and to make his Hollywood debut with 21 Grams. With his tenacious mix of critical irony and viscerality, and an unusually sensitivity to take away the glamour and artificiality of the story, he relied on a story about the fragility of human relationships, the fears and the contradictions as the vital force of the characters, the fatality of destiny and the uncertain paths that open up different emotional perspectives, as well as the conscious or unconscious options for personal redemption.

A film that included all kinds of filmic references and moral equations and crossed destinies in the style of Kieslowski or the everyday absurdities of The Hole (the dog trapped under the floorboards) to the hyperviolence and parallel stories of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the canine obsession of Bigas Luna’s Caniche or the brutality and tenderness of Takeshi Kitano (for example, El Chivo has a lot of elements of the antihero of Hana-bi).

Nevertheless, Amores perros surpasses the simple level of film homage to propose a perspective of a bitchy and wild reality; that one of a Mexico that is both profound and quotidian at the same time; that one of a society without direction that normalized violence, cheating, hate between siblings and bitterness as a substitute for adrenaline. Its premise: love, death and redemption tied together by a terrible car accident that involves a dog, a young man in love with his sister-in-law, a publicist who abandons his wife and daughters for a Spanish model and a former university professor and ex-guerrilla fighter who leaves his family to face a personal fight and the weight of absence.

Mexico City as an emotionally devastated territory; a sort of violent, dangerous and disturbing jungle, where paranoia and hate explode in every frame. However, Iñárritu and Arriaga did not try to create an apology for urban violence, but a reflection about its consequences and genesis, and play with this paradox from the perspectives of three stories with a brilliant photographic work by Rodrigo Prieto, where a mixture of handheld and wide-angle camera is used as a sign of civil unrest, an attractive sound design by Martín Hernández, an outstanding histrionic work and a formidable use of editing that plays with time and space to penetrate deeply into the daily horror of 25 years ago.

Translated by Adrik Díaz