Three great narratives in one film

The English subtitles amusingly translate Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 2000 film Amores Perros as Love's a Bitch - a good title for the film but it's also a film about love and dogs, though hardly a film for dog lovers: some truly gruesome and disturbing dog-fight sequences, for example. A P is really fine film, however, by almost any measure. A little bit in the tradition of (and maybe in advance of) popular films such as the Oscar-winning Crash (and there are others, such as an excellent Australian film with a title that's the name of a wildflower - can't remember) that sketch in the life stories of several characters or groups of characters who intersect by chance, in fact, in the 3 examples I've just cited, by car-accident. A P is different and superior, in my view, in that it doesn't manipulatively thread the story lines together for pathos or irony; rather, these are three distinct story lines told in sequence, three movies in one in a way (total length pushing 3 hours); the characters overlap but only very slightly except for the car crash that occurs within first few minutes of the film. The stories also each center on relationship between central character and a dog, oddly enough - but as noted it's not in the least mawkish or sentimental. Roughly, the three plots are: young many falls in love with brother's wife and turns family dog into a pro fighter to try to raised money to run off with (pregnant) sister in law; fashion editor leaves family and moves in with super-model and 2 are driving to screaming anguish as they try to find rescue tiny dog that is caught beneath apartment floorboards (in a truly creepy and stunning sequence that foreshadows some of Inarritu's great later work), and homeless man who does killings for hire takes in a stray dog that turns ferocious. Each of these has elements of Latin American Telemundo melodramas of course, but each is played out crisply, with some fine acting, fast pacing, and intelligent plot design. We get a real visceral sense of various sides of life in what I think is Mexico City - without the film's being overly schematic or far-reaching: he's not a pretentious director trying to score points or to show "all of life"; he's just telling three stories of lives that cross paths at one moment in time and then move onward, each on its own, possibly tragic, course. Special props to the always excellent Gael Garcia Bernal as Octavio, the central figure in the first narrative.