reviews/previews

Babel
In this Oscar-nominated movie, acclaimed director Alejandro González Iñárritu, brings to light the real barriers that seem to separate mankind. Babel, which by definition means “a confusion of voices and other sounds” and has been mentioned as “a tower built by a tower built by Noah’s descendants who intended it to reach up to heaven; God foiled them by confusing their language so they could no longer understand one another” in the Genesis (11:1-11). That is precisely the concept on which the movie is based and sees the lives of individuals, who otherwise have nothing in common or to do with each other, delicately entwined with each others’. The beauty of the movie lies in the multitude of ways in which it can be interpreted.

The movie focuses on four different set of characters and they each have their own storylines. Interestingly enough, individually they don’t seem to have anything in common or any point of connection, either geographically or culturally etc, but as the movie progresses, the viewer discovers that they are. The first set of characters is an American couple who come to Morocco. The second is the two children of the American couple of are left in charge of their Mexican nanny who needs to cross the border to attend her son’s wedding. We have the Moroccan Sheppard who buys a rifle from a neighbour in order to protect his livestock from wolves. And lastly, we have a Japanese father/daughter couple, the daughter is deaf and dumb and the father, a hardworking businessman. The latter seem to have the least likely connection with the rest of the characters in the movie.

The American woman gets shot by the Sheppard’s riffle which was fired by his son who had been playing around with it with his brother. The Mexican nanny cannot find someone to take care of the children while she attends her son’s wedding hence she takes them along with her. On the way back, she has a run-in with the border authorities resulting with her hiding with the children in the desert along the highway. The Japanese father finds it hard to reach out to his daughter who on the other hand is desperate for any connection with the outside world.

In some parts of the movie we get to see the world through her eyes where a possible connection can be established only visually but once her eyes are closed, it’s lost. This is perhaps most evident when she walks into the club, a place where dancing to the music that an attendee can ‘listen’ to is considered the norm. Instead of the music we’re confronted with bright, flashy lights. In the end, she doesn’t dance to the music; she dances to the rhythm she feels from the artificially-induced high she receives from the drugs she takes and the movement of the lights. One flicker of an eye and we’re there and then we’re not.

An interesting point made in the movie was that Babel doesn’t have to be between people who can ‘hear’ other people talk in a strange language, Babel truly exists when a person is unable to make sense of or communicate with those whom he/she wishes to. In one movie it displays the diversity of mankind, our vulnerability in a foreign land and our intrinsic desire to, putting it simply, ‘communicate’; to understand and be understood.

The movie deserves every bit of Oscar nomination it received this year. There are points in the movie when it may appear to be confusing for the viewer, but then, that’s Babel for you.

First Published:
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June 10, 2007