Very cool stuff! :D I've been meaning to see it for a long time but never really felt like it. Erik assured me it's not a movie about love. Given the title, "Lost love", I was a tad skeptical ;) but I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, I don't speak a word of Spanish (actually that expression isn't a good one, I speak about 20 words of Spanish, maybe even 50), so without subtitless I was really concentrating to understand as much as I could of the dialogue.
With every movie like this which is any good (hear that Tarantino? :rolleyes:), it's the story that carries it. Otherwise a portrayal of human unhappiness, stupidity, desperation, lack of judgement and plain disregard. There are three stories linked together, but as good as independent of each other.
There is Octavio (only name I managed to pick up) living with his mother and some girl he's in love with, who's married to the guy with the shaved head who robs pharmacies and supermarkets for a living. She's a mother of one. Octavio and his buddy need cash so they find a dog and enter it into a dog fight. Since the dog is a beast, it continues to make them money as it wins every fight. Octavio gives most of his share of the money to that girl. He also pays the guy who sets up these dog fights to send a couple of his thugs and f up shaved head guy for beating his wife. One day, this other guy gets sick of seeing his dog lose and pay Octavio money so he just shoots the damn dog in the middle of the fight. That doesn't sit well with Octavio, who stabs him in the gut. A getaway ensues, which ends in a spectacular car crash, which also happens to be the opening scene. Shaved head guy tries to rob a bank and gets killed by the cops.
Then there is the model, who moves into a new apartment with her boyfriend, practically void of furniture so you get a good look at the parquet floor. On the wall of the building across the street is a bigass poster of the model in one of her photo shoots. Here's where the magic begins. Driving to work the next day, her car is the one hit by Octavio in the getaway. She is badly injured and from then on rolls around the spanking new apartment in a wheelchair with her leg in a cast and a neck brace. Sadly, this is where the realism goes off the rails. If you've ever hurt your neck you will know that it hurts like hell to move it. Yet in every movie we see them, people just carry on like normal. At one point she also dismounts the wheelchair to look for the ugly ass dog which is somewhere underneath the parquet. Not long after that, she has a big fight with the boyfriend, locks herself up in her room and presumably takes some pills or at least passes out. Next thing you know, her leg is amputated, so modelling career not so much anymore. To round off the story, the poster across the street (a perfume commercials I think) is taken down. Meanwhile the boyfriend/husband starts going at the parquet with a hammer in the hope of finding the dog. Eventually he does and it's been bitten all over by rats.
The third story is about a bum (gotta love this guy) who is a contracted killer. He used to have a family but walked out on them or something and starts off by killing the guy his ex-wife married. He gets another contract to kill some kind of a businessman but he takes his time with that one. His house is a total hell hole but he has about 5 dogs. When the car crash happens, he's nearby tracking his target so he goes up to the wrecked car looks around the scene. A passerby asks him for help to open the car door and get the two guys out of the car, instead the bum robs the guy in the car who may just be dead already (Octavio). That shit warms the heart. :D The dog in the back seat (the one that was shot) is tossed out in the street and the bum takes it with him, tries to nurse it back to health. In pure poetic justice, once the dog does get healthy, it kills all the other dogs because it's so used to killing dogs at those dog fights. The bum freaks out. He then kidnaps the target instead of killing him, collects the other half for the hit and sells the guy's Mercedes. The guy is still alive though and when his business partner or some such comes to pay the bum for the hit, he's invited inside and meets with the guy he paid to have killed. Very cool scene! :cool: The bum gives him the gun and tells him to kill the guy himself. The guy is a chicken, of course, so he doesn't do it. The bum beats him up. He then takes a shower (must be a first one for years) and grooms himself, doesn't look like a bum anymore. He throws on a suit, breaks into the house of the family of the guy he killed (his old family), stashes some cash under the pillow in the bedroom and replaces a family picture of the parents and daughter with one where he plays the role of the dad. He's clearly deranged.
What I really like about the story is the next thread picks up where the previous one ended, so you're going ahead in time all the while. A lot of stories like this simply start a few threads at the same point and give a common ending, but here you're moving along the whole time and that's much better cause you're still curious about the different stories and the movies shows quick flashes of them all every few minutes even though it's really following one thread.
Horale!
August 10th, 2005
