{"id":17226,"date":"2007-02-02T18:05:59","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T08:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=17226"},"modified":"2015-02-22T18:15:45","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T08:15:45","slug":"babel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=17226","title":{"rendered":"Babel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"babelposter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Director: \u00a0<\/strong>Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu
\nWriter:<\/strong> \u00a0Guillermo Arriaga
\nCast: \u00a0<\/strong>Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett<\/p>\n

I<\/span> came into Babel<\/em> having only seen one other film by Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu.\u00a0 I saw Amores Perros<\/em> (Love’s A Bitch<\/em>) when it came out in 2000 and although I appreciate that it was a well made film, I absolutely could not watch it again.\u00a0 Set in South America, the film tells three different tales that are thematically linked by\u00a0 violence to dogs.\u00a0 I’m not sure what motivated I\u00f1\u00e1rritu to make the film but the harshness of it stuck in my mind during the opening few minutes of Babel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I flinched as the set up was immediately familiar.\u00a0 There are four tales linked by common emotive themes and characters that occasionally cross paths.<\/p>\n

There is the father of a destitute family in Morocco who purchases a rifle for shooting jackals to keep his herd of goats safe.\u00a0 His children take the rifle and while playing with it, one of them shoot at a tourist bus.<\/p>\n

On the tourist bus is Richard and Susan, an American couple with a failing marriage.\u00a0 Susan is struck in the neck by the bullet from the rifle fired by the children.<\/p>\n

The rifle itself was originally purchased by a Japanese tourist who has since returned home.\u00a0 He is struggling to cope with the suicide of his wife and rebuild a relationship with his sexually frustrated deaf-mute teenage daughter who seeks attention by not wearing underwear, going to public places and flashing people.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in America, the maid for Richard and Susan is in a panic because she wants to go to Mexico for her son’s wedding but can’t find anyone to look after the American couples’ kids who are only very young.\u00a0 Desperate and against her better judgment, she decides to take them with her.<\/p>\n

That is the set up in the first act.<\/p>\n

\"babelmovie\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Knowing what I know of I\u00f1\u00e1rritu’s work, I anticipated that as the story unfolded Susan would die, the Moroccan kids would get arrested, the suicidal teenage girl would get raped and something bad would happen to the American kids in Mexico.<\/p>\n

As it so happens, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu manages to make the situations more depressing<\/em> that I could imagine.\u00a0 He manages to strip a lot of the characters of their dignity and prolong their misery with a further twist to the tale.\u00a0 I’m reminded of The Bicycle Thief<\/em> in a lot of these stories.\u00a0 I think the idea of proud and good natured people dealing with tough times and resorting to desperate measures must strike a cord with I\u00f1\u00e1rritu.\u00a0 Often, these situations are antagonised further by bad luck or miscommunication.<\/p>\n

I guessed wrong with all my predictions.\u00a0 In the end, Susan doesn’t die.\u00a0 Instead she lies in a village with her husband, abandoned by the tour bus.\u00a0 She is drugged up and she wets herself.<\/p>\n

The Moroccan police come looking for the shooter.\u00a0 They find the boys and in a shoot out, one of them dies.\u00a0 It’s not the boy who fired at the bus though, but his brother who was innocent.\u00a0 The father weeps over his dead son’s body.<\/p>\n

The maid enjoys her son’s wedding without incident.\u00a0 On returning to America though, her nephew panics at the border and drives through illegally, leaving her and the children alone in the desert.\u00a0 She leaves the children behind to look for help and is eventually found, arrested and deported back to Mexico by the border patrol.<\/p>\n

As a stand alone film, I’m not sure how much you can get out of Babel<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s a series of increasingly wretched and miserable slice of life stories and there is little in the way of catharsis.\u00a0 I do feel that I\u00f1\u00e1rritu’s own life must be tied quite strongly to the themes of the films he makes though.\u00a0 The closing credits to this film dedicate it to his children.\u00a0 I think that you will be able to get more out of Babel<\/em> when you view it as a part of a body of work by I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, starting with Amorres Peros<\/em> and finishing with whatever comes after Babel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are signs there that his works are developing and changing.\u00a0 While the ending to Amorres Peros<\/em> was bleak and dispairing, Babel<\/em> does offer its audience a glimmer of hope.\u00a0 The final scene in the film returns to the deaf-mute girl in Japan.\u00a0 She fails at getting any attention from the men she desires, culminating in a moment where she stands completely naked in front of a police detective who spurns her advances.<\/p>\n

The ending teases that she has commited suicide and jumped off the balcony of her apartment.\u00a0 When we see her father return home and walk to the balcony, she is still standing there.\u00a0 He holds her hand and they embrace.\u00a0 Either I\u00f1\u00e1rritu is getting soft in his old age or maybe its a sign that he’s entering a new chapter in his film making career and becoming more of an optimist.\u00a0 Perhaps his next film will be a romantic comedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":17228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2188,1147,2187],"class_list":["post-17226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu","tag-brad-pitt","tag-cate-blanchette"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17226"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17231,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17226\/revisions\/17231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}