Babel By Vindana Ariyawansa
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (born - 15 August 1963 , Mexico City) Innaritu with his writing partner Gullermo Arrierga brought the human suffering to the screen in critically acclaimed hit Armores Perros in 2000. With the success of that movie and as a reward for his talent he was given an opportunity to work with the best American actor of his generation ,an equally enigmatic academy award winning actor of Spanish dissent and a talented Australian beauty( not mentioning Nicole Kidman).
It was in 2003 called 21 grams. The third and final installmant of those death trilogy is called Babel which also is Innaritu’s most complex and best creative effort in his young career so far. Two big Hollywood acting personalties named Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett jumped on the opportunity to work with Innaritu even though being a small part of an ensemble cast.
As its title implies, “Babel” is about the difficulty of human communication, but although the stories unfold in four countries and in five languages — English, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese and sign language is far from the principal barrier. Instead, the film explores the ways in which cultural assumptions and biases tend to obscure reality even when reality is plain, and the way our perceived differences keep us from finding a human connection to one another.
Clearly, González I?árritu digs deep into the existential loneliness of each character to create a kaleidoscope of cumulative human sadness and grief over the state of the world. With uncommon empathy and insight, he elicits moving performances from all the actors. Babel dares the viewer to find singular themes for all four stories, but I believe González I?árritu is mainly interested in what humanity is capable of producing, both good and bad, when it is presented with desperate situations.
He continues to depict these conflicts at the individual level, and he’s not above letting his characters make bad decisions. It’s a bit of a challenge for the viewer to watch Babel and not get angry at the characters for doing things we think we would be smart enough not to do in their shoes. But I believe this shows González I?árritu at his most humanist self in understanding human weakness and hoping that we can forgive such lapses.
At the simplest level, the movie is several dramas told effectively, and processing the emotions in its most dramatic moments may be the best reward in watching it.
The movie starts in a remote area, somewhere in the Atlas mountains of Morocco, where a Berber goatherd buys a high powered hunting rifle with a scope sight. Later he passes it to his adolescence sons instructing them to kill the jackals whose been hunting the family herd. The boys while killing time and with no foul thoughts try to test the rifle to see how farther it shoots a bullet. The youngest boy who happens to be a sharper shooter than his older sibling randomly takes aim at a tour bus passing by. Inside the bus an American couple Richard (Pitt) and Susan (Blanchett) are on vacation in Morocco.
Their new born has just dies and they are trying to mend their individual guilt over the infant’s death while taking a tour on Moroccan countryside. Their other son and daughter are at home in San Diego under the care of their longtime housekeeper Amelia (Adriana Barraza who has been with them since the children’s birth. In the traveling bust filled with tourists, Susan is hit on the neck by one of the stray bullet fired by the young Moroccan kid from the mountains. Mortally wounded and hours away from the nearest hospital, the driver pulls the bus to the nearest village. While one of the villagers trying to help Susan the other tourists want to leave the American couple behind and continue with their tour. Richard and Susan suffers the ignorant behavior of rich people on vacation while receiving enormous compassion from the poor villagers. The rifle Moroccan kids father bought earlier that day from the village guide was given to him as a gift for his services by a touring Japanese hunter.
Meanwhile, Richard while caring for his wife somehow get through to Amelia at their home in San Diego and demand her she must stay with the children for extended period of time even thought her own son is getting married in Mexico. Amelia’s efforts to find a replacement to babysit the kids go in vain and she is left with no choice but to leave for Mexico and take the children with her on the trip. She and the kids are being driven by her nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) across the border into Mexico. On the way back to San Diego, Santiago, drunk, gets stopped at the border and then bolts. Pursued by the border police, he leaves Amelia and the two kids in the desert to fend for themselves.
The story shifts to Tokyo, where a young deaf-mute teenager, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a deaf Japanese teenager whose mother has recently committed suicide, acts out her grief and feelings of isolation by throwing herself at every man or boy who crosses her path. Chiekom, her father (Koji Yakusho), was the Japanese hunter who gave away the rifle. Being deaf in an environment fueled by rock music and sensation-driven language, Chieko indulges in daring sexual behavior as her form of communication. She drifts through the crowded, pulsing streets of Tokyo, shot by cinematographer Rodrigo Pietro as though the city were a beautiful, whimsical contraption that appears even more startling and dreamlike when the sound drops out.
Chieko’s connection to the others is tenuous, but her experience provides the lyrical counterpoint to what are otherwise Kafkaesque tragedies about individuals swallowed up by the bureaucratic machinery of nationhood. The movie challenges us to struggle with these story fragments for nearly 2 1/2 hours before they finally come together in a way that makes the point that mankind is connected in a world in which political borders no longer make sense. Even though the title “Babel” explains the theme of the film, it resonated with me on another level. it is clear that human pain and suffering has a universal language.
The old Moroccan woman understood Susan’s pain and empathized, the father’s anguish over his son’s actions required no subtitles, we understood Chieko’s naked pain, Richard’s frustration and fear did not require dialogue, and Amelia’s horror and tears were emotionally riveting. García Bernal, in a smaller role as Santiago, Amelia’s funny, loose cannon of a nephew, is as charming as he is unnerving and tragic. When little Mike, strapped in the back seat en route to the wedding, remarks that his mother says Mexico is dangerous, Santiago turns to him with a mischievous grin and says, “It is.
It’s full of Mexicans.” Young, feisty, prone to trouble and uncommonly perceptive, Santiago, Chieko and Yussef chafe at the arbitrary constraints imposed on their lives by others. The limitations feel like a prison. And for Yussef and Santiago, they very likely become one. his skills, streamlining his daring storytelling method so that his parallel threads match each other in rhythm even as they occur at different times — in fact, leaving the timelines some room to be figured out in terms of where they are in relation to one another turns out to be a rewarding experience. González I?árritu’s movies are a model of how to keep viewers involved, an all-too necessary skill since he traffics so much in the unpleasant shared experiences of human grief.
In Babel’s case, grief isn’t the only unifying factor in its four distinct stories. As the film’s title would suggest, one of its major themes involves barriers to communication, yet simply stating it that way would be limiting. The movie is about the dynamics of other differences that come with difference in language, i.e. differences in culture, social classification, and attitudes toward others and toward oneself. To go further, sometimes language isn’t even the main obstruction here, as Babel takes equal opportunity to show the flip side — that even when we speak the same language, we communicate poorly to each other, sometimes with dreadful consequences. And, of course, we are also shown the idea that though we may all speak different languages and live in different environments, many of our experiences are the same.
The beauty of this film is in its lapidary details, which sparkle with feeling and surprise. And the glue that’s supposed to hold our interest as we’re whisked toward this moral is less the story than the strong performances of its cast. As credible a job as Pitt does and for all the visibility he gives the film, I would argue that his presence detracts from the experience. His super stardom keeps the ensemble off balance, and his deliberately aged look is a constant distraction. It’s definitely a nerve-racking, one-of-a-kind experience that holds you tightly within its grip through its lengthy running time and forces you to empathize with a large cast of international characters and their individual quests in a visceral way.
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