GOOD 'PERROS,' FULL OF TRICKS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

``Amores Perros'' is cinema supersized, simultaneously giddy and grave with the possibilities of the artform. The feature debut of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is a novalike display of talent, and a lengthy one that never fails to be smart, engaging, audacious and haunting.

It's also a little too derivative to be as full of itself as Inarritu makes it. But selmportance and artistic pride seem like forgivable human faults, and are certainly more than permissible in the case of this movie, which manages to balance an Old Testament moral harshness with a less-obviously scriptural view of both men and beasts' shaky but definite potential for absolution.

Oh, and dog lovers are going to have a problem.

Scrunching time frames and perspectives for their own narrative purposes, Inarritu and his screenwriter, the novelist Guillermo Arriaga, tell three different but interconnected stories about, well, love and canines, all of which intersect at a horrendous, Mexico City car crash.

The filmic format screams Tarantino, of course, but Inarritu insists that if anything was an influence, it was William Faulkner's masterpiece ``The Sound and the Fury.'' I don't entirely buy that, but I will give him the benefit of such ambition, as the film does its best to express individuals' inner torments while constructing a wider mosaic of a dysfunctioning society.

The Faulkner novel that should be invoked, however, is ``Absalom, Absalom!'' for both its own three-part structure and baldly biblical references to parental betrayal and fratricidal resentment.

In the film's first story, an emotionally unformed teen-ager, Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal), initially commandeers the loyalty of his criminal older brother's Rottweiler, Cofi, and then, less certainly, of his sibling's unappreciated wife, Susana (Vanessa Bauche). Octavio turns Cofi into a vicious dog-fighting champion in order to make the money that will enable him to run away with the pregnant Susana. These efforts lead directly to the cataclysmic wreck - which by all rights should provide an end to Octavio's agony, but doesn't.

The second story involves the other car and another dog. The driver is beautiful blond model Valeria (Spanish actress Goya Toledo), who has just moved into a high rise condo with her older, married lover Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero). She's left in a wheelchair, with pins in her legs, her career on indefinite hold if not over. But Daniel remains, at least for awhile, solicitous, and fortunately Valeria's fluffy little pup survived the accident unscathed.

But then the beloved dog gets stuck beneath the apartment's floorboards. It's not a good thing.

Our last key player is an old, apparent bum called El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), who lives in a rambling squat with a pack of stray canines. He is actually a former professor turned revolutionary turned convict turned the paid assassin he is now. His latest job involves another pair of contentious brothers, but ... he also has a grown daughter who thinks he's dead, while on the barking family front, he's made the mistake of rescuing gut-shot Cofi from the crash instead of an injured human. Clearly, lots of reassessment is in store for the old goat.

Obviously, the similarities between people's and dogs' behavior is a major motif here, as is their comparative sufferings. Inarritu swears, and reportedly has extensive documentary evidence to back him up, that no animals were actually harmed in the making of this movie. Still, watching the amazing simulations will inevitably be too hard for some viewers to take. What should be just as difficult for all of us, although it probably won't be, is working up an equivalent revulsion to the film's myriad depictions of human agony.

Inarritu comes from TV advertising, and he has a full command of that medium's slick visual and editing tricks. He employs these skills throughout ``Amores Perros,'' but never at the expense of performance or dialogue. Like most directors who come from his world, Inarritu is thoroughly conversant in the vocabulary of cinema; unlike most of them, though, he knows how to tell stories with it.

And like his style, the stories Inarritu tells in ``Amores Perros'' are brutally dazzling yet fundamentally humane.

``AMORES PERROS''

(Rated R: violence, language, sex, nudity, drug use)

The stars: Emilio Echevarria, Gael Garcia Bernal, Goya Toledo, Alvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche.

Behind the scenes: Directed and produced by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Written by Guillermo Arriaga. Released by Lions Gate Films.

Running time: Two hours, 33 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three and one half stars

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Emilio Echevarria plays an assassin who cares more for dogs than humans in ``Amores Perros,'' an ambitious and brutal movie set in Mexico City.