That's not to say the film is not without its share of ugliness. DVD Talk's original review for the film calls it "relentlessly downbeat" and "a movie to watch when you're feeling depressed," but this reviewer has always found it too aesthetically thrilling and ultimately hopeful to entertain such a reading. It's buzzy, bombastic, intimate, and melancholy. The film rode the trend of telling three stories that overlap chronologically and intersect thematically, as seen previously in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Doug Liman's Go, but it managed to not feel gimmicky (something that Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's Hollywood follow-up 21 Grams decidedly failed to do).Īmores Perros alternates between frenetic intensity and stately introspection.
They remain "everyday Germans," only slightly less generic than the film's title suggests, valuable chiefly as signifiers of Germany's evolving relationship with its past.Amores Perros was one of the great films of 2000, jump-starting a global interest in Mexican cinema and making names for first-time director Alejandro González Iñárritu, first-time star Gael García Bernal, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Neither allies nor enemies, Charlotte, Wilhelm, Friedhelm, Viktor, and Greta are avatars of history all the same, their psychologies hazy, subject to the diffusions of cliché and hedged inference.
Those same viewers require more from the plight of these characters, however, than the film is equipped to give. Non-Germans might sense in this enactment of these Berliners' wartime failings and sufferings a faintly therapeutic quality. All except Viktor (Ludwig Trepte), who is deported and joins the Polish Resistance after escaping from a concentration camp, will take on shades of the archetypal "good German" over four years of war in the beginning they are less black-and-white than green. Five young friends - two women and three men, one of whom is Jewish - part on a raucous 1941 evening, filled with romantic ideas of the war and where it might take them, certain of their return to Berlin by Christmas.
Generation War presents a war of individuals whose actions are guided not by evil or ideology but common ignorance, self-interest, obligation, and compromise.
Conceived and undertaken, in the words of producer Nico Hofmann, as "a sensitive, critical homage to the generation of my parents" - those "everyday Germans," according to writer Stefan Kolditz, caught out by history as adult life began - the four- hour production was also designed as a conversation piece. Created for German television, the World War II epic Our Mothers, Our Fathers has since aired on Polish, Irish, and Swedish networks, and now finds its way to a theatrical release, retitled Generation War for American audiences.
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