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, 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.