Babel English Movie
It's providential, if not outright miraculous that at the end of the year we've been blessed with a film that takes the cinematic experience way beyond the realm of the linear or even the cogent.
"Babel" is a babble of languages, cultures, voices, attitudes and expressions - all bonded outwardly by nothing more than an elemental desire to be heard beyond the fascinating fusion of politics, culture, religion and bigotry that forms the framework for all contemporary inter-personal relationships.
Departing from last year's remarkable episodic drama "Crash", "Babel" doesn't attempt to bring the various stories together in a clasp of comforting culmination.
"Babel" just lets the babble be. And therein lies its beauty. It's a spiral of gripping activity in cultures in several parts of the world.
In Morocco two adolescent boys fool around with a gun precipitating an international diplomatic scandal when a stray bullet hits Cate Blanchett, an American tourist. Blanchett plays Brad Pitt's wife and the couple are on a pleasure trip in the country.
Cut to Tokyo where a deaf and mute girl (Rinku Kikuchi) is famished for sexual gratification. Her encounters with Japanese men of various sizes would be funny, even erotic, were it not so hauntingly poignant.
Director Iñárritu doesn't offer us the joy of seeing his characters arrive at any comfort zone. Till the end they remain vitally unmoored, not even seeking to find answers to their geo-political disorientation.
There's an immense ruggedness in the storytelling. Take this - two little American children and their nanny join a Mexican wedding celebration. The energy just flows out of the screen. And you wonder where the disturbing yet heady mix of revelry and crisis is leading or is it not leading anywhere?
Hurling through the disparate cultures of "Babel" in one sweep of ambivalent cinema, you are left looking at people and cultures that define themselves through their uncertainties.
Not a single actor, not even matinee idol Pitt, looks like an actor. Not one location is fudged. Not a moment in this lengthily laid-out pastiche of curious resonance rings untrue. This is a document of the human heart as seen through eyes that never blink.
Is "Babel" the best international film to be released in India in 2006? Possibly... Innaritu has made an enormously self-indulgent film that miraculously escapes the consequences of its stylised storytelling.
Once you get a hang of the stirring echoes that reverberate across the mammoth canvas, you don't care for anything except the characters' restless lives.
In that sense, this is cinema at its most basic level.
