FILM
REVIEW – BABEL.
Writer, Director, Alejandro González Iñárritu's brilliant,
but sometimes depressing film, Babel is one that just has to be seen. It takes
its title from the Biblical Babel of languages that leads to human conflicts
and failure to understand cultural differences. The story, or rather, stories,
cover events in the interconnected lives of several families, in Morocco,
America, Mexico and Japan, with scenes subtitled into English whenever its non
US stars, (Kate Blanchett & Brad Pitt) are on screen.
Events are
not given in a linear fashion, and so the plots unfold like a global scale
jigsaw puzzle. The style is that which the director used equally well in Amores
Perres. /film.review-ammores.peres.html
In Babel, a
humble goat herder finds that jackals are attacking his herd. He buys a high
velocity rifle to help ward off the jackals. Lazily, he gives the
responsibility of firing the gun to his two adolescent sons. He tells them that the rifle can fire a
bullet up to three kilometres, which the boys soon put to the test. In doing
so, they hit a coach, carrying tourists through the country, seriously wounding
Kate Blanchett, who is with her estranged husband, Brad Pitt. The story now
splinters in two with focus on Pitt’s efforts to save his wife, and the
consequences for the goat-farming community.
The
shooting is immediately declared to be an act of terrorism. The Moroccan
authorities, clearly eager to avoid a conflict with the US similar to that in
Afghanistan, start a ruthless investigation. The boys who fired the shot
confess what happened to their father, who tries to cover up the story for
their protection, and gets himself to be the focus of the investigation. After
a desperate attempt to hide the rifle goes wrong, and one of the boys is
killed, the other boy smashes the rifle and confesses to what really occurred
to the incredulous, but not unsympathetic police chief.
Pitt struggles
to get his wife properly treated. The bus driver takes them to a small village
where villagers who have no hospital look her after. Eventually a doctor is
brought in, but all he can do is help stitch up her wound, (without anaesthetic
or removal of the bullet), leaving Blanchett in screaming agony. Pitt struggles
to get the US Embassy to come to his aid. He also sparks a small-scale civil
war among the coach passengers who are divided on whether to leave him and his
wounded wife behind or stay to offer support. The faction wishing to abandon
them eventually wins.
Pitt also
unwittingly launches the third major plot strand. He phones his American home
to let his young children know that he will be late getting to them because his
wife has been injured. This causes problems for his Mexican housemaid, who is
minding them. She hopes to go to a family wedding in Mexico. but she is
expected to stay behind due to the Morocco crisis. After desperately trying to find alternative minders she decides
to go to the wedding anyway, taking the children along for the ride. Though they get into Mexico easily, and have
a great time at the wedding, the journey back to America turns into a
nightmare. Offered a drive back by a man clearly too drunk to drive, they are
stopped at the border. The woman has not actually got proper papers, (and
having been an illegal immigrant for sixteen years, is oblivious that she is
not now an accepted American citizen). Worse, the driver has already faced
convictions for drunk driving, and from fear of losing his license again; he
decides to make a break for it, leading to a very scary police chase in the
dark, with the terrified children in the back of the car. To save himself, he
eventually dumps the housekeeper and the children in the New Mexico desert
where they end up on the brink of dying in the heat and for lack of water
before being found. The housekeeper is told that she will be deported.
The other
strand is that which takes in Japan. The rifle used in Morocco proves to be one
that was originally left with a guide there as present years before by a
Japanese tourist, as a token of appreciation to the men he regarded as friends
there. The police in Tokyo are alerted to the crisis in Morocco and want to ask the man about this merely as a
routine enquiry. The Tokyo man is not a suspect in any criminal or terrorist
activity.
Unable to
find the man, the police tell his deaf mute daughter of their wish to see him.
The girl is distressed, thinking by sheer assumption that they are re-opening
an investigation into her mother’s suicide, some years before, after which the
police had made life unbearable for the father and herself (the only witness to
the suicide). This leads the girl to extreme acts of sexual rebellion,
(removing her panties and wearing ultra short skirts in public, trying to get
herself groped by authority figures, including a dentist and the policeman who
sees her, etc), and pushes her to the brink of suicide herself. She is only
pulled back from ending her own life (for the time being at least) when her
father finally finds out what is going on.
Stunning
cine-photography and a music score to die for enrich the film. There is an
amazing strobe lighting saturated drug trip sequence in Tokyo when the
disturbed girl goes from a public park where she takes speed, through her visit
to an acid house dance club which fills with very trippy lighting shots, and
music, cut with instants of almost painful silence as it is seen through the
eyes of the deaf girl. Blanchett gives a fine performance as a woman seriously
injured in a place with no medical comforts, though the best performances are
those of the Moroccan actors. Absorbing, and convincing throughout, this is a
very impressive film indeed.
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