Movies leave you with a message. Really good movies leave you with three or more.
Alejandro González Iñárritu truly redeems himself with his direction of the Oscar-winning Babel. Perhaps I shouldn't say that considering I've only seen one of his other movies, Amores Perros ("Love Dogs" or "Love's a Bitch" in English), but the countless scenes of bloody dogs in that movie was enough for me to hate the guy.
Other than the brief beheading of a chicken, Babel has no tortured animals, just a poor Cate Blanchett who gets shot in an extremely unlucky, wrong-place-wrong-time type of situation while vacationing in Morocco with husband Brad Pitt. The unhappily married couple's two perfect blond-haired, blue-eyed children are back home with Aemilia (Adriana Barraza), the kids' nanny and an illegal immigrant from Mexico. When no one else can watch the kids, Aemilia is forced to take the kids back to Mexico with her for her son's wedding.
Meanwhile the culprits of the Blanchett shooting, two young Moroccan brothers who were innocently and foolishly testing out a new high power rifle purchased by their father, hear that an American tourist has been shot on a bus. They panic as they realize what they have done. The rifle serves as a link to the fourth story of the movie which takes place in Japan. A deaf-mute teenage girl, tortured by social pressures and stifled by her inability to speak, is determined and desperate to lose her virginity.
These four loosely related sets of situations are cleverly and successfully interweaved, unlike Amores Perros where the stories were rather sloppily wrapped together. Iñárritu has an odd way of establishing time in his movies. In Babel, the stories keep jumping back and forth, leaving you with the impression that they are all going on at the same time. In actuality, however, the different events precede and follow one another and it is up to the viewer to piece the puzzle together. It is a stylistic move more than anything less. Nevertheless, it works.
The stories unfold and while the link between the situations is clear, the underlining relationship and point of it all are not. Monica clued me in that the movie is essentially about the overbearing lack of communication among humans, which makes sense considering its title (See Babel). I left the movie believing it was about the opressiveness of governmental and social systems, while my boyfriend came away with a statement about motherhood (the motherless Japanese girl and Aemilia as a vicarious mother to the kids).
In any case, this never boring, curiously developed, neatly crafted film is worth seeing. Iñárritu spells out a message for you, and the beauty of it all is you can read it any which way you want.
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