“Babel”

I missed “21 Grams” but loved “Amores Perros”. From the rather poor current catalogue of films I had to pick the new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu. (Which one if not that one? “Night at the Museum”? You must be joking).

Now, people like me, who can't help diving too deeply into films and end up loving almost every piece of cinema as long as it's able to alter our state of mind, people like me should never write about a film in the heat of the moment. Because when the main characters utter the last mighty sentence of their epilogue and that powerful close-up slowly becomes a long traveling, when the image fades to emptiness again and the whole meaning of the story dawns on your mind, when the last chord of strings gently vanishes inevitably taking you down to the ground of a random cinema in a random city, when the end titles start pulsing on the screen… then it always takes quite a long while for people like me to recover and come back to Earth. We would happily ban any talking or gesture inside the auditorium. No communication until everyone is outside of the cinema again and become fully aware that it was fiction, realize that they need to wait for the bloody bus in the cold and remember that such suggestive soundtrack never pops up in their lives automatically as it does on the screen (shame!). Switching back from art to life needs some graduality and care, as scuba divers need slow decompression before putting their feet on dry land again.

Having said that, I hereby resign myself to never being a good film critic.

And having said that as a disclaimer, I must say that I pretty liked “Babel”.

The formula of woven lifesnaps linking distant people as shown in “Amores Perros” has become a recurrent resource in the toolkit of scriptwriters (“Crash” to say one example). And it may seem that Iñárritu has made of it one of his features. In this case the links are weak and barely justify the connection between the four parallel stories. But you are willing to forgive that sin if the single stories are intense enough by themselves. And I think they are.

On the surface, these stories show how tough and difficult communication is between different cultures. Four countries appear (USA, Mexico, Morocco and Japan) and I think that the valuable lesson is that even if every single character behaves in a coherent, more or less right way when analysed in isolation, their reasons and interests clearly collide with others' reasons and interests and cause conflicts which damage all of them (us). How can it be, that being roughly good as individuals the net result of our interactions is misunderstanding and harm? The answer comes in a second read: it is not a matter of different languages, distant cultures and ethnocentrism, but a matter of being human. For the characters within the same country display no less conflicts between them than they do with foreigners (Richard and Susan at the beginning of their holidays, and both of them with the rest of the American tourists; the Moroccan brothers with their father, and their father with the policemen; ちえこ —Chieko— with her father and with the boys of her age).

These stories also show how insignificant events may change your life and even the lives of other people.

It reminded me of Sofia Coppola's “Lost in Translation”. The music by Gustavo Santaolalla fits very nice.

I specially enjoyed the story that takes place in Tokio. I'm starting to see Japan, Tokio and the Japanese language with a different look, and it kind of thrills me because I know myself well enough to understand what that may mean. I can't speak Japanese. It seems so difficult that I haven't but started to learn the very basics which some day may allow me to start learning the beginning of what could be something resembling Japanese. But even those two or three easy words that I caught from the dialogues between Tokyoite characters really excited me. Every time I recognized a “ございました” to put a touch of politeness in a sentence, some “すみません” (“I'm sorry”) or that “アメリカじん” to refer to the couple of characters from the USA… boy, sounds it good!