Film Review (H'wood): Babel (2006)

ba·bel: a. A confusion of sounds or voices, b.A scene of noise and confusion.

Babel numbs! And leaves you motionless. Gradually, consciousness returns to the limbs and the few moments, after the end credits emerge, feel like an hour. And if I remember accurately, the sensation was similar at the end of the other two films. Its something that Innaritu refers to as a common thread between his films' characters as well – that the proximity, engendered in their relationships, is shaped by moments of sorrow, pain, loss and helplessness, not those of happiness. I stumble into the nearest Barista and an espresso down, the cords with the fictional characters finally melt away.

{By now, most who've seen this film know it to be the last in the (sometimes known as 'Death') Trilogy. The two other films – Amores Perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003) – were probably viewed by most Indian film lovers on DVD, if at all. While I missed the theatrical windows as well, despite being in the US then, I did follow through with the DVDs.}

Guillermo Arriaga's screenplay and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's direction are the vision behind what we see over these 3 films and 6 years. While Inarritu calls them a trilogy since he believes that all three films are about parents and children, I still believe that the consistent themes across them are interlinked fates and lives and their influences on the emotion we know as Love - love of many kinds. He paints Amores Perros on a canvas of the blood and gore of dog fights and throws characters with different shades of love, hate and respectability into it. He then attempts more tragic moments of death in 21 grams and experiments with the English language (not his native tongue) and is ably assisted with outstanding acting by Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (21 grams is also believed to be the exact weight lost at the moment after the last breath). But to think Babel “addresses global concerns (his words in an interview) apart from the implicit political and social comments” is absurd. (Later in that interview...) he 'confesses' that Babel is “basically a quartet, basically about four stories about parents and children, those intimate and complex relationships in which I think we can find everything—all the drama, all the joy, all the hope, all the pain, all the complexity". Yes, its four stories. Ignore the attempts to connect them all and they are very poignant stories, gut-wrenching, posing the challenges of raising a child in an increasingly complex world – one in which borders disappear for commerce but are erected higher for understanding other cultures and people. (Inarritu, in his personal life, also made the choice to leave Mexico for the United States, with his family, and his perspective is ingrained in the depiction of cross-border complexity in Babel.) Babel also combines two curious elements of acting. The superstars in Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett fade away behind the characters, from personas that usually seem unflappable to very fragile ones, seeking compassion from the viewer. The other was that a lot of actors on location are not professionals, but volunteers selected from speaker announcements at mosques and markets. This was unintended but when it succeeded in Morocco due to a lack of shortfall in casting, Inarritu was delighted to use it in Mexico as well.

The other element that has been a editorial delight in the films, most apparent in 21 Grams and less so in Babel, is the juxtapositions of non-linear sequences from different characters' lives (he has so many to choose from). It leaves room for the audience to be sucked into the temporal anomalies and achieve balance – an engrossing aspect of being a spectator at the cinemas.

Good filmmaking evokes all the senses to participate, something that Inarritu promises to do for a few decades ahead. To think that we've only watched his first three full-length features is proof of that. However, good filmmaking does not guarantee a good story. The script still holds centrestage. The prime example that comes to mind is the disappointment of M.Night Shyamalan and the chronology of his films over a similar 8 year period – they went from superlative to mediocre. Shyamalan's films are dominated by the script and there isn't an overriding need to tickle all the senses. In fact, certain senses are almost subdued deliberately – he almost wants the dominant participants to be the mind and heart. In that, Inarritu is different, choosing fascinating landscapes and lending some of the leading composers (western and Japanese) of our time for Arriaga's screenplay. It would also be incorrect to attempt a comparison of this trilogy to any contemporary filmmaking. All 3 films have stunning moments – of storytelling, of acting, of the range of human emotions, and the ability to keep the tension at the edge of a butcher's knife. Yet, the need to connect the stories or to label them a trilogy seems more forced with each story. In Amores Perros (also released as 'Love's a Bitch'), a tightly interlinked Mexico City neighbourhood is a believable concoction of human emotion. In 21 Grams, the location of 'anyplace in suburban America' lends credence to the characters but the improbability of their emotional states is sometimes suspicious while in Babel, we are drawn into a new pinnacle if one measured the amplitude of each relationship, but the impossibility of coincidence is stark. With the trilogy completed, and with the best of talent signing up, one hopes that Inarritu's obsession with connected souls and lives has drawn to an end, and another era of storytelling emerges from the Babel.