Babel
Director: Alejandro Gonz‡lez I–‡rritu
Rated: MA
Now screening


In 'Babel', as in their previous films 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams', screenwriter/director team Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro Gonz‡lez I–‡rritu attempt a fairly abstract expression of the social affects of tragedy in a networked social environment, only this time the network is global.

The film opens somewhere in the arid mountains of Morocco where a rifle is being sold to a small goat-herding family. The two young sons of the family are sent off with the weapon to protect the grazing goats, and pretty soon they are taking bets on the accuracy of the rifle, to the point that they decide to test it on a bus on the road below the mountain they are on. In a second narrative stream we learn that the shot in fact hit one of the bus's passengers, an American tourist named Susan (Cate Blanchett) on holiday with her husband Richard (Brad Pitt). The two have had some marital problems but the crisis at hand forcibly redirects their attention, not only to the trouble of getting her to a hospital from the middle of nowhere, but also toward the marital problem-transcending emotional connections they hold.

Their children and foreign housemaid Amelia (Adriana Barraza), all back in the US, get their own storyline too, involving a Mexican wedding. In another, seemingly unrelated storyline, we have Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a deaf-mute and slightly rebellious Japanese teenage girl who has trouble with a largely mean male population unsympathetic to her condition and some psychological issues left over from the death of her mother.

Despite the bloated synopsis, the film doesn't really move very far plot-wise. More important are the characters themselves, given emphasis both through face-centric photography and intense performing. The viewer is provided an attachment to characters' experiences almost unparalleled in film.

The central question, then, is whether the characters are worth being attached to? The answer is probably no. All are severely underdeveloped and, though they have plenty of intense emotional experiences, without the substantive point of reference which strong characterisation provides the blur of such things as emotions remains a blur. The abovementioned attachment to character is thus really an attachment to a whole lot of blur, and the result is severe dizziness.

William McGinley