Date posted: November 2, 2006

Babel

Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu

I would like to like this movie, I really would. But as it is, it's one of the silliest and most boring films I've seen for a long time.

I had been looking forward to seeing Babel ever since I read about it when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. I still like the idea behind the movie. It was filmed in four different countries, with a cast comprising Hollywood stars and local actors, who speak their own language. If there's one thing that I find utterly stupid about standard Hollywood productions, it's American actors playing foreigners by speaking English with a supposedly foreign accent, unless it's inspector Clouseau, of course.

The problem is that when it comes to drama director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga know no bounds. One of the main characters is a deaf mute adolescent Japanese girl. This in itself is enough to give rise to some pretty dramatic scenes, for instance when boys reject her when they find out she's deaf. But Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga add even more drama when it emerges that her mother has committed suicide and that she found her body.

In another storyline a Mexican nanny and her cousin, who have taken the two children she has taken care of for 16 years, to a wedding party in Mexico, are stopped by the police when they try to cross the US-Mexican border. Again, this in itself is enough drama, but no, González Iñárritu and Arriaga have the cousin break through the border. Now this only happens in movies and that's another problem with Babel, its adherence to the laws of Hollywood.

At some point it all became so ludicrous that half of the audience was laughing during what were supposed to be dramatic scenes. In another scence a man, whose wife has been accidentally shot while on a bus tour in the middle of the Moroccan desert, asks a villager in whose house they are waiting for an ambulance, for a pan so she can pee. Great. A moment of reality. But as he holds her in his arms and she pees, they start kissing and discussing their marital problems and the death of one of their children. But they have not put aside the pan yet! And no, I wasn't the only person in the audience who noticed this, because their was chuckling all around me.

It's a shame though, because the idea is nice and the images from Tokyo, Morocco and Mexico are magnificent.