The Traffic route to "complexity": three interlocked storylines under one umbrella. All of them, set alike in Mexico City, have to do with one kind or another of love, and all of them involve dogs and varying degrees of cruelty thereto. The one point of intersection shared by all three is the high-velocity car collision that opens the action and that recurs three more times, from three points of view, at different junctures in each of the stories. The first and lengthiest of these, treating of dogfights, stickups, sibling rivalry, and intrafamilial infidelity, is so unrelentingly harsh, brutal, ugly, squalid, etc., that first-time filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu was all but guaranteed to be branded "passionate." His disinclination to hold the camera steady -- his surrender instead to forms of cinematic palsy and paroxysm -- tends to confirm his fervor. The color, even though equally suitable for a designer-jeans ad in Vanity Fair, appears to be boiling away before our very eyes, as if the screen were a Presto electric griddle. The stylistic tics will persist throughout. Next comes the shortest, neatest, most self-contained story, with the least spillover into its two neighbors, an ironic little anecdote about the transformation of a love nest into a rats' nest. The pet pooch's disappearance down a hole in the floor, his untraceable whimperings in the dark, and the random prying-up of floorboards in search of him, have a Poe-like flavor of nightmare. But an amputated leg is insufficient reason to bring up Buñuel, even in a Spanish-language film. The third and tallest of the tales concerns a homeless hitman with a wide streak of sentimentality for the wife and daughter he left behind in his past life as a teacher, and for his surrounding pack of stray dogs. None of the three is very engaging, and none gains much by their merger -- besides bulk. (Two and a half hours' worth.) But you can see why the filmmaker has been likened to Tarantino: a less daunting benchmark than, say, Faulkner. With Emilio Echevarria, Gael Garcia Bernal, Goya Toledo. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd