Babel

A Mexican woman is in trouble after crossing the border with the kids she’s supposed to be babysitting. The kids’ parents are in trouble because during their trip through Morocco, they are shot by a young goatherd boy intoxicated with the power of a new gun. The gun was originally owned by a Japanese businessmen keen on hunting, whose deaf-mute daughter is going through all the difficulties of adolescence with the added difficulty of few people understanding what she’s trying to tell them. The abiding impression I had when leaving the cinema after viewing Babel was that it was exactly like a David Mitchell novel, right down to the Japanese portion.

Like Mitchell’s books, Babel is really several disparate stories (three major ones, plus that of the goatherd boy, which is more like a prologue and addendum), linked tenuously in terms of plot but strongly in thematic terms, the link here being the difficulty of communication when taken out of the society you know. Getting help for Cate Blanchett’s character, shot in the shoulder, is difficult for Brad Pitt’s because he’s stranded in Morocco, help delayed because of a rowing governments arguing about the possibility of terrorism, and can only speak to his tourguide. Language and culture differences get explosive on the Mexican border into the US. The deaf-mute Japanese girl has enough difficulty communicating with the world around her without being able to talk or hear.

But of course, the film runs into exactly the same problem as Mitchell’s books. Three short films wedged into the space of one just doesn’t feel satisfying. Each story has its tensions and its emotive moments, but rather than complimenting one another, they jar and distract. Are we really supposed to care about a Japanese girl’s sexual repression and angst when kids are left in the desert to die? Is there really enough plot in the story of two Americans waiting in desperation for an ambulance to arrive to match the other fast-paced stories around it? For a film about alienation and a feeling of otherness to work, perhaps jarring works well, and different filmic styles in different sections compliments that concept, but it is perhaps taken so far that the film as a whole suffers, feeling disjointed and diminished in relevance.

Which is a shame, because some of the raises it makes are very interesting. Perhaps if they were actually developed to fruition, the film would be more satisfying, but for all the questions it raises – ‘Do different cultures mean different temperaments?’ ‘Is privilege expected for whites?’ ‘How do children perceive cultural differences?’ – the ones that are actually explored are few and far between. In the end, the children are nothing more than tools to heighten the drama, the reaction of the Moroccans to the Americans never becomes known and consequences remain mostly obscured. It would have been hard to make a full film with the concept, but I think there was a lot more to explore here, and better ways to link the disparate strands.

That said, it was well-made, with some superb location shots, excellent acting from stars and unknowns alike, and a real sense of the identity of each place – Tokyo seems wild yet impersonal, Mexico a little intimidating but a lot of fun, Morocco deprived but full of real lives etc. While they did a good job of making the little room the Americans ended up in claustrophobic and isolated, though, at points the sound seemed very badly recorded, as though the mic had to be turned up really high to catch the dialogue and then they put it through too much processing to remove the hiss. A minor complaint, though, and probably worth it for the performance, if not the dialogue.

Overall, a film worth seeing, and similar to a Mitchell book only in structure, not themes or plotlines. Not one I’d feel inclined to watch again, nor which I would say was essential viewing, but one that will certainly entertain.