BABEL

Confusion and chaos

by SHASHANK SHRESTHA

FROM ISSUE # 133 (January 2007) | IN THIS ISSUE
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Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blachett, Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho
Rating: 4.5/5

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams) presents yet another powerful and emotionally gripping tale of confusion, angst, and depression in Babel.

The three loosely interconnected stories begin in Morocco, when two young boys Ahmed and Yousuf unwittingly kill an American tourist Susan (Blanchett) with a hunting rifle their father had recently purchased to kill jackals with. Her husband Harry (Pitt), who was trying to use the trip to mend his relationship with his wife, falls apart, even as the media hypes the incident into a terrorist threat. The gun that caused this chaos belongs to a Japanese businessman, (Yakusho), who is coming to terms with the guilt of his wife's suicide and the pressure of raising a moody, rebellious, deaf-mute teenage daughter, Chieko.

Meanwhile on another continent, Harry and Susan's children are stranded at the Mexican border, as their Mexican illegal immigrant nanny Amelia cannot return.

In the bible, man tried to reach heaven by constructing a tower called Babel. God punished the humans by inventing many different languages, ensuring that they could never communicate enough to complete the tower. In the film, this language barrier

is particularly poignant in the case of Chieko, who was born without the ability to actually 'converse'. When she visits a Tokyo nightclub, we momentarily cut to her point of view and are greeted with silence, disco lights, and the incomplete world that fuels her frustrations.

Babel, a leading contender in this year's Golden Globe Awards with nominations in seven categories, tackles a variety of issues—media madness, political conflicts, unfair immigration policies, broken families, and cultural divides. The movie is not sugar-coated, but presents life graphically, blood, nudity and all. The cast is superb, and though one story falls into the happy-ending trap, the others maintain their lifelike complexity to the end. Babel is hard to shake.