Babel
(dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
Another heavy-hitting multi-stranded drama from Inarritu, very much in the style of Amores Perros and 21 Grams.
Here we've got several stories dotted around the globe to tie up:
*Two young Moroccan brothers involved in an accidental shooting
*Tourists Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Morocco (ok, you can see where those first two might join up)
*Mexican nanny Adriana Barraza taking care of the Pitt/Blanchett brood while they're on holiday, and getting a lift with her nephew Gael Garcia Bernal across the Mexican border to her son's wedding
*Deaf teen Rinko Kikuchi looking for trouble in Tokyo and her father Koji Yakusho (Memoirs of a Geisha) trying to communicate with her
All the stories are beautifully shot, with a consistent level of intense performances all round, but it's hard to escape the feeling that this is a film so caught up by the weight of its message (if only we could all just… talk… to… each other) that it somehow falls short of the greatness of AP and 21G. Would these stories have any less impact if they were told in chronological order?
Started to remind me a little of Wim Wenders' underrated Until The End Of The World, zipping around the globe, building up a sense of the world being connected, from a Tokyo disco to a Mexican wedding. For a while this is all powerful enough to pull you through (Kikuchi's a stand-out performance) - but somewhere it seems to lose focus, and the reliance on what really boil down to some fairly shallow (if undeniably well acted) stereotypes (kooky Japanese teen, volatile hard-drinking Mexicans, rude American tourists etc) makes it a somewhat shallower experience than it seems to *cough OSCAR* think it's delivering.
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29th Dec 2006 - Tumblr
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