The film Babel is just about to come out over here, but has done the rounds in North America, along with Notes On A Scandal, the other big Cate Blanchett film. One thinks fair enough regarding Babel, as it’s essentially a US production, but Notes On A Scandal is such a British movie- and specifically a North London movie – that it does seem odd that America gets to watch it months before the UK.
You say Babble, I say Bay-ball, let’s call the whole thing… a pretty good film. It’s the latest by Mr Inarritu, the director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, who likes to cram into one melee a group of stories which would make perfectly good movies in their own right. Rather good value for an evening. Buy one Inarritu film, get three or four stories, and have fun working out the chronology and connection of each scene. I adored 21 Grams, likening it to an episode of Casualty re-edited by a madman. Babel is pretty much the same sort of thing, but less aimed at people with Attention Deficit Disorder. The intertwined melodramas are given longer segments at a time, and are spread around different countries and different languages, hence the title.
Mr I likes to see people having a really rotten time, though in a rather masterly and stately way. There’s a scene early on which really jolts the viewer out of their seat. It’s a single line of dialogue between two bored shepherd boys on a Moroccan mountain, who are trying out a new rifle with a spot of target practice.
‘Bet you can’t hit that rock.”
Bang.
“Bet you can’t hit that other rock.”
Bang.
“Bet you can’t hit that bus full of tourists.’
The director is in complete charge of his style and universe. He just doesn’t seem to like people very much. There’s no such thing as good or bad in Inarritu’s world, just bad luck, mistaken assumptions and heavy-handed authorities.
Poor Ms Blanchett has enough of a rotten time in Notes On A Scandal, finding her life at the mercy of the madder yet wiser Ms Dench. But this is a picnic compared to her role in Babel. After one scene rowing with Mr Pitt, presumably because he looks a bit tired and old and thus we want our money back, she spends most of the film’s duration bleeding to death in an American accent, a fate last endured by Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs.
The connection that links a lonely deaf-mute schoolgirl outdoing Lost In Translation in Tokyo with the rest of the stories is a bit unlikely and forced, but that’s a very minor reservation. A more personal complaint is that Mr Inarritu likes to present the English middle classes as cardboard and selfish irritations for others to react against.
Michael Maloney, the hopping love interest in Truly Madly Deeply, is the headmaster in Notes On A Scandal charged with dealing with two troublesome women on his staff. In Babel, he’s a fellow tourist more concerned with fleeing in the bus than with preventing Ms Blanchett from dying in a corner of a foreign field. Oddly, his own accent sounds jarring in the story, perhaps because his actions are unrealistic. No one is THAT inhumane, not even the English.
It was the same with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s London character in 21 Grams. She was desperate to get pregnant with the dying Sean Penn’s child, even though their marriage had died some time before. Again, her accent seemed as curiously uncertain as her selfish and unsympathetic actions. I can’t help thinking the director has some kind of personal grudge against the English.
These flaws aside, Babel is worth all the acclaim it’s attracted, full of original and gripping scenes. You really feel drawn into each of the myriad worlds: in the car driven by Gael Garcia Bernal’s hot-headed Mexican as suspicious border guards shine their torches through the windows; sharing the shock of a small American boy as Mr Bernal demonstrates a party trick involving unkindness to a chicken; on a Moroccan floor miles from a hospital as Ms Blanchett undergoes emergency surgery without anaesthetic; in the Tokyo nightclub with the lovelorn schoolgirl, hearing at turns both the blaring music and her own silence; dodging police bullets with the mortified, terrified shepherd boys as they run for cover on the mountain. No choice whether to sympathise or not: you are there in every moment.
The next natural step is for Mr Ianarritu to adapt some stories from Los Bros Hernandez’s Love & Rockets graphic novels. They’re the nearest comparable works, and I can’t be the first to say so.
