Headnote
On a desolate Moroccan hilltop, a bored boy takes aim with a rifle, wondering how far a bullet can travel. A second later, everything has changed - for him, for his family, and for families tens of thousands of kilometres away. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu cuts from North Africa to California, Mexico, and Japan, creating an unnerving history of human beings and the boundaries they create.
THIS YEAR'S Oscars ritual was unusually international. Best Director and Best Feature nominees included the British Stephen Frears (The Queen) and the Mexican Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (Babel). Even the iconic G.I. Joe Clint Eastwood shot his masterful Letters from Iwo Jima not just in Japanese but from the perspective of the once demonized enemy. Canada's Foreign Film entry was Water (2005), Deepa Mehta's story of the plight of widows in Varanasi, India, a salutary departure from our usual French/Anglo taffy pull.
Perhaps Hollywood was eager to detach itself from the isolationist interventionism of President Bush's foreign (not to say alienating) policy. Even as the us debated what kind of wall to build against Mexican migrants, three of the year's best feature films came from Mexican directors. Guillermo del Toro, known for the phantasmagoric Cronos and The Devil's Backbone, set Pan's Labyrinth in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In this Best Foreign Film nominee, an imaginative young orphan finds fulfilment and appreciation in an underworld kingdom, of which she is princess - whether or not it exists. Alfonso Cuarón offers a dystopian antithesis to his coming-of-age films, Y Tu Mamá También and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In Children of Men, the human race is dying out because for decades there have been no pregnancies. Of course, the sterility is blamed on the women. No one is left to come of age because our warbased society failed to grow up. The discovery of a pregnant black woman suggests the human adventure might begin anew, but as the men keep fighting and betraying, the odds are slim.
OF THE THREE, Iñárritu's Babel made the biggest splash. Iñárritu has brought globalization to film narrative. He told the Mexican story in the anthology film 11'09'01 (2002), which offered responses to the Twin Towers attack from such stellar directors as Youssef Chahine, Amos Gitai, Shohei Imamura, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Mira Nair - and Sean Penn. Even on his own, Iñárritu eschews the traditional focus on one hero, one plot, in favour of multiple fictions that discover a fateful link between apparently unrelated characters and stories. Typically, a small transgression results in resonating disasters. While no man is an island, everyone is a powder keg. His characters are riven isolates blessed/cursed with ignorance of their destinies. Last year's Oscar winner, Paul Haggis' Crash, clearly followed that model, but centred on social issues rather than on Iñárritu's existential.
In Amores perros (2000) - a.k.a. "Love Dogs" or "Love is a Bitch"-a traffic accident connects three people from disparate classes in Mexico City. Octavio (Gael García Bernal) needs money to run off with his sister-in-law, so he enters his dog Cofi in a dogfight. Fleeing the dogfight, Octavio runs a red light and causes a collision. That ruins the new bliss of a young couple, Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero) and Valeria (Goya Toledo), as Valeria loses a leg. A homeless dog lover, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría), witnesses the collision. This bleak drama's characters are maverick mutts of dangerous instincts.
In 21 Grams (2003) another accident shatters the lives of three people. Paul Rivers (Sean Penn) is a mathematician in a dead marriage to Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg). He needs a heart transplant, but she wants him to freeze some sperm so she can bear his child. Cristina Peck (Naomi Watts) is a druggie turned happily married mother of two little girls. Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro) is a career criminal reformed by his fundamentalist Christianity.
Jordan accidentally runs over and kills Michael Peck (Danny Huston) and his two daughters. In a transplant, Peck's heart saves Rivers' life. Given to completing equations, the mathematician tries to assume his benefactor's protection of Cristina. Jordan, despite his wife's objections, turns himself in. Released from prison, he leaves his family and faith, as Rivers tracks him down to avenge Cristina's loss. Cristina, Rivers, and Jordan are all on tormented quests for justice and redemption. The names evoke Christian mythology - from the various Marys down to the Rivers Jordan. The title refers to the human body's precise weight loss at the moment of death - i.e. the weight of the departing soul - but it could also pass for the weight in a drug deal.
Iñárritu has developed an opaque narrative style. He interweaves separate stories, scrambles the chronology, and conceals all coherence. So it was perhaps inevitable that he would turn to the biblical parable of Babel (Genesis, 11:9). There Confusion is the curse of the human condition, explained as our punishment for aspiring to reach into the heavens. The language that should connect us instead divides.
In Babel, a San Diego couple, Richard and Susan Jones (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), are vacationing in Morocco, having left their two children with their Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza). When Susan is seriously wounded by a bullet fired into their tour bus, the bus is forced to take refuge in a remote desert village. The American government quickly claims that Susan is the victim of a terrorist attack. But the shot was the idle mischief of a young goatherd, Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), trying to impress his older brother Ahmed (Said Tarchani). The rifle came from a Japanese hunter, Yasujiro (Koji Yakusho), who is now back home, struggling with his wife's recent suicide. His deaf teenage daughter Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is also struggling, but in a much more dangerous way.
When the Jones' return home is delayed, Richard insists Amelia stay longer with their children. As she is unwilling to miss her son's wedding in Mexico, the nanny decides to take the American boy and girl across the border with her. Her return trip ends in disaster, and she loses the children in the desert. They are eventually found, but Amelia is deported. The stories are intertwined, but their points of connection - the bullet, the rifle, the phone call - are not revealed until the end. These links are unimportant.
THE IMPORTANT cohesion is the theme of barriers, whether the obstructive communications between people or the bureaucratic imposition of borders. Of course, communication is a problem in all the citizens' exchanges with the officials. Because the Moroccans reject the US government's claim that terrorists are responsible for Susan's shooting, the Americans refuse to let a Moroccan ambulance go for Susan, so she must wait for a us military helicopter. Because of the US-Mexico border tensions, Amelia's drunken nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernai) panics, causing a reckless car chase, the loss of the children in the desert, and Amelia's deportation after sixteen years in the States. As we see Amelia's devotion to all her children - real and assumed - her expulsion feels unjust. But in contrast to the Moroccan policemen's brutal interrogation of the peasants, the American border officials seem officious but reasonable. Chieko's treatment by the sensitive lieutenant Mamiya provides the police ideal.
Cultural differences cause other forms of alienation. Though the Jones kids watch Spanish TV cartoons at home, they are out of their element at the Mexican wedding, especially when the game of catch-a-chicken ends in its manual decapitation. The more serious cultural differences erupt on the Moroccan tour bus, as the British, French, and Australian tourists grow fearful of the locals and resentful of having to stay with the wounded American and her increasingly irate husband. Eventually, they drive away without Richard and Susan.
Richard turns Ugly American in his impatience with a Moroccan official, but he and Susan are treated generously by Anwar (Mohamad Akhzam), the Arab who takes them to his village home. He finds a veterinarian to sew up Susan's wound, sans anesthetic, so she won't bleed to death, while Anwar's grandmother salves Susan's pain with an opiate.
Iñárritu uses establishing long shots to define the unsympathetic spaces that dwarf his characters, whether the Mexican and Moroccan deserts or the Tokyo nightscape from a thirtieth-floor condo. More often, he moves a hand-held camera through the characters' experience - from the contagious celebrations of a Mexican wedding and a Tokyo nightclub to the turmoil of the Moroccan scenes, around Susan's suffering, and the goatherd father and his sons as they are besieged by the police.
The most touching barrier lies between the child and the adult. The American couple have gone away to work through the agonizing death of their infant son. Richard's support through Susan's suffering stills their recriminations and recovers their love. His telephone exchange with son Mike (Nathan Gamble) - which we see early in the film and again at the end - signifies a new closeness. Still, the children have lost their Amelia.
Little Yussef wrestles with his burgeoning manhood, as he flaunts his marksmanship and furtively watches his sister Zohra (Wahiba Sahmi) strip for him. But when he tries to protect his fleeing father and brother by firing on the police, they return fire and wound his sibling. In Yussef's true moment of manhood he smashes the rifle, admits his guilt, and surrenders - begging that his family be spared. Similarly, Chieko struggles with her own maturing, through her impeded language, quarrelling with her volleyball referee, flashing her sex (like Zohra) at boys, aggressively importuning her dentist, and finally trying to seduce the police lieutenant. In her climactic reconciliation, she stands nude in her father's embrace, weeping, on the same balcony from which her mother jumped to her death (or so she has told the policeman).
The surrogate mother does not suffice for the Jones kids; the Moroccan goatherds are, by poverty and tradition, forced prematurely into adult responsibility; and the orphaned Chieko feels herself cruelly isolated in crowded Tokyo. As if in summary, Inarritu dedicates the film to his own children, "The brightest lights in the darkest night."
THREE STORIES are told sequentially, but Inarritu leaps back and ahead between them. The cut that takes us from Susan's scream at being sewn without anesthetic to the silence of deaf Chieko's nightclub perspective seems a relief. The silence Chieko perceives is like our incomplete understanding of a foreign language. But as she sees what she cannot hear, we infer meaning from what we cannot hear. We connect despite language. But it takes the kind of effort required to leap over a wall. Where the biblical Babel was vertical, a tower built up into the heavens, our modern Babels are horizontal - geographic, linguistic, cultural, and psychological fences that we erect against the strangers we would rather fear than understand.
AuthorAffiliation
MAURICE YACOWAR writes criticism and fiction in Calgary. His latest book is The Sopranos on the Couch: The Ultimate Guide (Continuum, 2007).
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