Like the Fountain, Babel is a film that I can't yet write about, out of respect for the style of film, and not wanting to ruin it for those who have yet to see it. So this review will be of its strenghts and weaknesses, and generally critiquing it's style, not the specific plot points, etc.
Babel, the third collaboration between director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his writing partner, Guillermo Arriaga, is a stunningly beautiful, disjointed, emotional rollercoaster, ranging from charming, lovely scenes of familial bliss to down right sadistic personal tragedies. Babel follows four seperate groups, who each experience there own tragedy, connected to shooting of an American tourist in Morocco. Other reviewers have tried to make this event sound like the catalyst, but that's not quite true, as the web of interconnectedness has not origin, and that's the point. We focus on these four, but the story could easily go back further, and will continue. Such is life. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, and is so disjointed that the veiwer may not immediatly be able to pick up on the chronology of events, the interconnectedness of the four different stories, and may even forget that, for example, something is going on simulatneously in Mexico. When we one story we haven't heard from in a while pops up, we are thrust back into the Mexican Boarder, or the hills in Morocco, and the full emotional weight of what's happening is made more real. The transitions are not fluid, and this jarring effect works well in forcing the veiwer to emphathize with the characterts. In one scene, for example, in a Japanese club, the film switches back and forth between the perspective of Chieko, a deaf-mute Japanese girl who is the focus of one of the narratives, and the perspective of the narrator. In effect the blasting dance music becomes an unbearably silence, with a muffled bassline undectable. Uncomfortable and awkward though these transitions may be, we suddenly have more understanding with this troubled girl. Her deafness alone is only one facet of her character, and we quickly learn that her socialization problems are much more complex. Her deaf friends provide this contrast, as if Iñárritu is saying to us directly, she is troubled, look at her tragic life. Chieko's narrative has been criticized by other reviewers as being a tenuous connection, at best, to the other three, but they are looking to closely at the plot, and not grasping what Arriaga and Iñárritu are trying to accomplish. This isn't a thriller, or mystery, and the non-linear structure is necessary because we are following the trajectory of each tragedy, not the chronology of events or specific plot. This is a story about emotions, and about the mechanisms in our world which produce such tragic lives. The story ends with a beautiful shot of Chieko and her father on the balcony of their topfloor apartments, towering over the Tokyo skyline. Rodrigo cinemetagraphy is gorgeuous, as always, and worth the price of admission alone. He works amazingly well with Iñárritu, and scenes such as the afformentioned discotech scene, in which the strobe seems to reduce Chieko to a series of photographs, are executed perfectly.
When the fellow Western tourists on the bus refuse to wait for help to arrive, we may see them as terribly cold and uncaring, but we are, in my view, not meant to take them literally (as if no westerner would risk their lives to help an injured fellow traveler.) Instead they are an abstraction, representing prevailing sentiments of Orientalism in the wealthy western traveler. Morocco became too real once the comforts of home and tour group disapperared. Cait Blanchett's character seems to be in this mold, until she is shot, that is, forced to reimagine her life and worldview.
Chieko is the emotional center of this story, and her breakdown is it's climax. When we see a scuffle at the US Border crossing, or two poor Moroccan farm boys get wrapped up in an international incident after accidently shooting an American tourist on a far off bus, or the aftermath of the shooting as a couple seeking to fix their marriage after loosing a child to SIDS, we are not focusing on the specific tragedies necessarily, but instead on the mechanisms in the system of living in a globalized world, the relations of power which produce these missunderstandings. Chieko is central to this understanding of the film, as her inability to communicate is more apparent, and her failure to socialize makes this more tragic. Even the loss of her mother makes the parallels all the more powerful, as we learn in the end.
The actors range in how succesful their contributions to the film are, but this is to be expected in a film that is essentially four films wrapped into one, with three different production teams in Mexico, Morocco, and Japan. Standout performances by Said Tarchani, as young Moroccon sharpshooter Ahmed, and Adriana Barraza, as the nanny Amelia, are worth noting. Gael Garcia Bernal's role as Santiago was much shorter than I had anticipated, but well acted as well. Rinko Kikuchi, as Chieko, of course steals the show.
The score is performed Gustavo Santolallo, who does an excellent job of incorporating local flavor into his guitar playing in each scene. His one guitar manages to evoke Spanish style flamenco playing, Mexican folk, Arabic influence, and Japanese modes, subtely, uniting the pieces together in a common language.
The Biblical reference may be less central to the story than implied, for it focuses, as far as I can tell, on the misscommunications and obvious references to towers or biblical stories(Chieko's apartments, the hospital in Morroco, Amelia wandering in the dessert.) Perhaps this just showing us how stories of Biblical importance and moral lessons occur today, or perhaps it is a parable, warming us of the danger of striving too high. Man was punished for his great technology, attempting to build a tower to reach towards the heavens. It seems that we are being warned that with todays rapid technological growth and the era of globalization, we too are put in our place by mechanisms in the world. We are all connected, and the backlash from our hubris is inexcabale.
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