babel

if the narrative was not such a gimmick; and if there was not this need to sort it all out in a perfect circle all at the end; this film might have actually worked for me. each of the four episodes in isolation worked without the ham-handed depiction of world-wide connectedness or the sometimes silly anti-american preaching.

so many of the sequences are gorgeous and often very moving- beautiful to look at, in spite of the one lapse into the moralistic reprimanding of the american tourists in morocco. my favorites must be the wedding sequence in mexico and the club scene in tokyo. the undertone of sexuality in the teenagers was also a welcome addition of reality into what otherwise could have suffered from the cute kids syndrome of a hollywood film. the acting is superb all around. it salvages the film from its rather contrived structure and shows us sometimes emotions that felt real and true.

the end wraps things up too neatly. the only child who dies is the child who did not pull the trigger in morocco, while the blond kids bereft in the california desert do finally get home to their parents. the spanish maid who has raised the children gets deported and in japan the father and daughter embrace over the lights of tokyo.

what is ironical that for a film that wants to talk about the distances that separate us through language and culture, and unite us through what would be called our ‘common humanity’ it ends up tying things up too easily; as if to leave some strand loose, or to leave some aspect unexplained would throw us completely off balance- and that’s not allowed. the tower of babel is actually completed thus destroying the power of the myth.