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Babel, 2006
In an intertwined set of tales spanning Morocco, Mexico, the United States, and Japan, incidents such as the shooting of an American tourist, a wedding, a fraught border crossing, a police investigation, and themes of parents/children, communication, and international relations combine and overlap.
This film has been vaguely on my radar for ages, as I remember very well it's release and the general acclaim that it got. I'm glad to have finally checked it out.
Movies with interconnected narratives can be a mixed bag. They require a certain kind of suspension of disbelief about the choices that characters make or events that happen to them coinciding with outlandish or improbable things also happening to other characters in a very short span of time. Maybe what was most interesting to me about Babel was the way that it managed to at once feel "realistic" and grounded while at the same time being pretty overt in some of its style and artistry.
Once I noticed the similarity of certain visual moments, I started seeing them everywhere. Now, that could just be a kind of visual confirmation bias---seeing what I expected to see. But I just kept seeing mirrors of gestures: an adult helping a child eat a tortilla, a woman helping another woman to draw smoke from a pipe. The framing of characters holding one another.
And while there's a very handheld look to most of the filming, the use of color and space is really strong. Again, the film seems to switch effortlessly between moments that almost feel documentary---like a stop at the border---to moments that are unabashedly cinematic.
The different sequences each have their own feel, and it might just be down to personal taste which a viewer thinks is the strongest. Brad Pitt's face was heavily used in promoting the film, and he and Cate Blanchett are half of the center of the Morocco section as an American couple on holiday, still reeling from the SIDS death of their baby. I thought that they both gave good performances, managing to pull you in with their desperation even as they alienate with multiple ugly Americanisms. (Some of these are not entirely in their control--such as the immediate declaration by the US that they were victims of a terrorist attack---but their lack of gratitude to the many people who try to help them or, you know, serve them food is very off-putting.)
I thought that Adriana Barraza--as a woman who has been living and working illegally in the US for 16 years, and makes the mistake of taking the children with her to Mexico for her son's wedding--gave my favorite performance of the film. Her kindness and wariness feel like they go all the way down to the bone. Despite what she's done for her own family and for the family she works for, when push comes to shove no one is really on her side.
Style-wise, I really enjoyed the sequences in Japan. Rinko Kikuchi plays a young woman whose feelings of alienation and not-belonging related to her deafness are taken to a fever pitch by the stress of the recent death of her mother. My favorite moment of the film is one in which Chieko is partying at a wild club with friends and a group of boys. She has a huge smile plastered on her face until the moment she sees her best friend making out with the guy Chieko has a crush on. In that instant, we see how the club goes from being intoxicating to oppressive and claustrophobic. Yes, there's interest to be had in the way that the sound cuts out or booms as we move in and out of Chieko's point of view, but it's the look on Kikuchi's face that really sells the moment.
My only challenge with this film was a bit of what I mentioned above: just a lot of people making really stupid decisions that end up being all connected. While it mostly worked, at times it strained credulity just a bit too much.
Babel, 2006
In an intertwined set of tales spanning Morocco, Mexico, the United States, and Japan, incidents such as the shooting of an American tourist, a wedding, a fraught border crossing, a police investigation, and themes of parents/children, communication, and international relations combine and overlap.
This film has been vaguely on my radar for ages, as I remember very well it's release and the general acclaim that it got. I'm glad to have finally checked it out.
Movies with interconnected narratives can be a mixed bag. They require a certain kind of suspension of disbelief about the choices that characters make or events that happen to them coinciding with outlandish or improbable things also happening to other characters in a very short span of time. Maybe what was most interesting to me about Babel was the way that it managed to at once feel "realistic" and grounded while at the same time being pretty overt in some of its style and artistry.
Once I noticed the similarity of certain visual moments, I started seeing them everywhere. Now, that could just be a kind of visual confirmation bias---seeing what I expected to see. But I just kept seeing mirrors of gestures: an adult helping a child eat a tortilla, a woman helping another woman to draw smoke from a pipe. The framing of characters holding one another.
And while there's a very handheld look to most of the filming, the use of color and space is really strong. Again, the film seems to switch effortlessly between moments that almost feel documentary---like a stop at the border---to moments that are unabashedly cinematic.
The different sequences each have their own feel, and it might just be down to personal taste which a viewer thinks is the strongest. Brad Pitt's face was heavily used in promoting the film, and he and Cate Blanchett are half of the center of the Morocco section as an American couple on holiday, still reeling from the SIDS death of their baby. I thought that they both gave good performances, managing to pull you in with their desperation even as they alienate with multiple ugly Americanisms. (Some of these are not entirely in their control--such as the immediate declaration by the US that they were victims of a terrorist attack---but their lack of gratitude to the many people who try to help them or, you know, serve them food is very off-putting.)
I thought that Adriana Barraza--as a woman who has been living and working illegally in the US for 16 years, and makes the mistake of taking the children with her to Mexico for her son's wedding--gave my favorite performance of the film. Her kindness and wariness feel like they go all the way down to the bone. Despite what she's done for her own family and for the family she works for, when push comes to shove no one is really on her side.
Style-wise, I really enjoyed the sequences in Japan. Rinko Kikuchi plays a young woman whose feelings of alienation and not-belonging related to her deafness are taken to a fever pitch by the stress of the recent death of her mother. My favorite moment of the film is one in which Chieko is partying at a wild club with friends and a group of boys. She has a huge smile plastered on her face until the moment she sees her best friend making out with the guy Chieko has a crush on. In that instant, we see how the club goes from being intoxicating to oppressive and claustrophobic. Yes, there's interest to be had in the way that the sound cuts out or booms as we move in and out of Chieko's point of view, but it's the look on Kikuchi's face that really sells the moment.
My only challenge with this film was a bit of what I mentioned above: just a lot of people making really stupid decisions that end up being all connected. While it mostly worked, at times it strained credulity just a bit too much.