Bébés / Babies

‘No-brainer’ is a term conceived precisely for films like this. The thought process behind the creation of this documentary is as simple as it gets – find four babies from different cultures around the world, point a camera at them and capture the various things babies do as they happen, from first steps to first words. And that’s it.

And yet, that’s all it needs to be. It’s as simple as it gets, but it’s a documentary about babies. Everyone knows what to expect, and they can coo at the cuteness and laugh at the silliness. It’s a film called Babies. Job done. What depth and insight do you expect? Indeed, the worst parts of the film are when there’s an attempt to say more than ‘look, these babies are cute’, like when there are four scenes of the babies with pets. The Japanese one seems oblivious to the cat. The American one looks concerned at her family’s cat, which she does most of the time. The Mongolian one is happy to bother their cat. The Namibian one…plays with some flies. It’s a pretty poor juxtaposition, especially since a few scenes later the African baby is playing with some dogs, and it was probably the film’s one inadvertent, rather outraged laugh.

The rest is just babies being silly, which is what’s on the tin, really. The Mongolian baby is inherently funny, with his chubby cheeks and curiosity. I suspect the American parents have been made out to be weird with the particular editing – the father is shown not only wheeling a baby down a slide on her little cart when she’s clearly too young and ends up on her face in a sandpit, and on another occasion he takes her to an awful parenting group thing where the parents sing silly songs and the baby gets up and toddles to the exit to try to escape the building. The Japanese one we don’t see much of for some reason, but has a very funny scene where she is trying to figure out putting a rod into a hole in different little discs, and has very dramatic fits when it doesn’t go quite right. The Namibian baby’s scenes mostly highlight cultural differences in a fascinating little tribe where the women have extremely impressive hairstyles and are seemingly mostly separated from the men. There’s a very sweet scene where one slightly older child helps the baby play a game where he walks as far as possible with a can balanced on his head.

It’s perhaps quite satisfying to see children of very different cultures having the same experiences, but nobody ever doubted that all human beings learn to stand, to walk, to eat and to jabber at their parents. No surprises here, then, but who needs ’em? You come for the cute babies, or you’re not going to be watching this film at all, are you?