AND THE THINGS THAT MATTER; LOVE, LIFE AND DOGS : "AMORES PERROS"

I have to admit, chances are you have seen this one. It is a masterpiece by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inaritu and is cited in a lot of respectable sources as one of the best films ever made. I am not quite sure how one would qualify “the” best film ever made, but the breath-taking sequences, insightful, sensitive and yet exciting storylines and the way the characters lives clash together for one life-changing instant definitely makes it a contender in my book. Sometimes, an event is much like a pebble thrown into the water. The ripples it causes may end up hitting a distant shore and changing things the pebble or the thrower had never imagined… Here, funnily enough, it all starts with (or culminates in) a car-crash…
There are three parties to the car crash, two cars and one old homeless guy who lives with his dogs and witnesses it. In one car, there is Octavio, his beloved Rottweiler Coffee and his best friend ??. Octavio’s life is a bit of a mess, he lives with his brother, his brother’s wife and his mother in a tiny house. This in itself is a difficult situation but he is also in love with his brother’s wife – they are actually having an affair… He dreams of making enough money so they can run away with his little nephew, and Coffee is the goose that lays the golden eggs – because Octavio enters him into dog fights where Coffee is a little too good for his own good and his masters… In the other car is Valeria, a famous model. She is driving back from the new house her boyfriend has hired for her; he has left his wife for her and a wonderful new life with just him, Daniel, her and her beloved dog Richie is opening up in front of her… Or rather it was until the crash came along leaving her with potentially career-ruining scars… And then there is the old man. He lives alone with the street dogs he has rescued over the years. And as other witnesses run to save the survivors of the crash he concentrates on dragging Coffee out of the car. He takes him home and nurses him back to health. Little does he know that his new friend is going to change his entire life, dragging him back to something he should have finished 20 years ago…
This film is very, very clever. Like a lot of films of the same kind, it starts off showing snippets of various characters. It’s quite a mystery figuring out who’s who, but then again I find that kind of thing very amusing. It is told in three chapters, and although every chapter focuses on one of the stories I told above, the other stories creep in too, around the periphery… We watch the crash three different times, and as a spectator it is fascinating to gage how, us the amount of information we hold increases, the impact and importance of the crash also seems to increase… The editing is also clever, although the story cuts from one strand to another, sometimes quite dizzyingly; the cuts are all very, very cleverly done – I would go as far as saying an example to be held up for good editing.
Art imitating life or life imitating art? Hard to say really, isn’t it? One thing I do know though is that it is always touch and go when various artists try to closely copy life; I don’t mean in a Hollywood sense – they just do whatever the heck they like and expect us to just assume it’s real – but when it tries to make it really realistic… Here, it doesn’t feel like a film at all. We just watch dogs and owners (and the dogs are very much in the forefront of the story) go through life, much as if it were just a dramatic slice of life… Definitely worth your time…

AN UNUSUAL BUT REWARDING LITTLE GEM : "NATURAL NOVEL"

Ok, it is time, yet again, to update the “literary” side of my blog. Now, I read this interesting little number a while back. Now, I love reading but since I have a 9 to 5 job to hold down it has become a bit of drag for me. Not because I enjoy it any less but because I am tired when I get back from the office and cannot for the life of me concentrate on reading anything. Natural Novel proved an exception to this rule however. Once I got into it, no matter what I did I could NOT put it down. Which was slightly bizarre, because I started it almost by accident and had no great illusions as to whether I would like it or not… Now, Natural Novel is a very VERY “modern”. It has a storyline sure, it has a beginning a middle and an ending too. Well… After a fashion.

Natural Novel is the story of a man whose life has just fallen apart. Our narrator tells of his failed marriage and his wife, who, he has just found out, is pregnant by another man. He then goes off on a tangent. Several tangents. The book is presented in chapters, the longest of them two or three pages long and they can be best described (in fact I saw the description in another review on the internet) as a series of vignettes. Each one may or may not be related to the initial topic or indeed the “vignette” that came before it. The story emerges, disappears, changes direction. Oh it develops and ends all right but in the true “modern” style the line is as far from linear as you can possibly imagine.

Now, you might think this would make a book almost impossible to read. I only started reading it because it was part of some volunteer work I was doing a while back – and had the exact same prediction. What I hadn’t factored in however, was Gospodinov’s talent. Each snippet, each vignette is a masterpiece in its own right, and besides, the style of the book dictates that one is perpetually left with the nagging curiosity as to “what comes next”. Plus, like I said the “main” story itself does actually advance you’re just never quite sure when it will start doing it. Plus, I have to say, it gives a VERY accurate picture of post communist life in Bulgaria. (I seem to have forgotten to mention this but the author of the book is Bulgarian) In fact, one of the main aims of the book seems to be the description of life. Personally, I liked the fact that we are almost in the mind of the distraught narrator – we rollercoaster along with him as his mind rambles and he jumps from one topic to another. I personally finished it in a matter of days and found it both fascinating and humorous. I also feel lucky in my discovery of Gospodinov. I strongly recommend you step into his world…