"babel" by Baran

A film by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
(Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchet, Gael Garcia Bernel, Yuko Murata, Koji Yakusho, Adriana Barraza, Said Tarchani….)

It’s a long time since Babel was destroyed. Our miscommunication has had a long time to evolve, and here Mitsu(Yuko Murata) is standing naked on top of colors and noises of Tokyo, far above this crazy kaleidoscope , with nothing to cover her but her pain and loneliness.
Babel is said to have been the tower made in order to reach paradise by a united human society, and “god” angry with human beings going after name and seeking his glorious territory instead of worshipping their god, broke Babel into pieces and created different languages as barriers among his creatures.
Richard(Brad Pitt) tries to break the code and communicate with Susan(Cate Blanchet) who is drowning in her grief, and unable to do so he sits next to her in the bus in the middle of a foreign land surrounded by unknown people. Silence governs till tragedy hits them and the code breaks.
Here sad tragic events pour over every family’s life like ruins of Babel. And it’s through these tragic events that characters either fully awake to realize their communication gap or succeed in taking a step towards solving these miscommunications.
And as if language was not enough they confront a world based on differences: sexual, racial, social, economical…. Differences which are more pronounced in the post September 11th world, where a large number of people are the usual suspects.
Inarritu tells three interwoven stories, and he wisely chooses his locations to cover the whole world in a way: San Diego(California), Mexico, Morocco and Tokyo. He succeeds in picturing different layers of miscommunication, starting from the Moroccan family, showing difficulties they have in their relationships; father and sons, brothers, younger son and his sister. Then it gets to the next level, grief stricken Susan and Richard who are taking time together in Morocco, and yet it goes to another level, the Mexican nanny who wants to go to his son’s wedding but is trapped with her illegal situation with Richard and Susan’s children in San Diego, and then to show you the pure picture of this disconnection between us he takes us to Japan to show hard efforts of young deaf and mute Mitsu to communicate with people around her with no apparent success.
And Inarritu zooms out, now we can see the broader image, the miscommunication between countries and political leaders, between “3rd world countries” and the “developed” ones. He narrates the tale of a world which is full of misinterpretations, a situation fortified sometimes ridiculously in recent times.
Mitsu and her friends go to a disco, the place is filled with crazy music, dancing neon lights and drunk or drugged teenagers dancing to the music…And the camera turns and it is silent. You can still see the dancing neon lights, you can still see crazy happy teenagers dancing and kissing and partying but it’s absolutely silent. Now you’re experiencing Mitsu’s world and the gap is horrifying, mass of bodies moving in neon lights to an absent rhythm, and the camera turns again and you come back to the familiar place you knew, but now you can read Mitsu’s puzzled face smiling and dancing to a music she doesn’t know anything about. Inarritu takes you back and forth between disconnected communication lines.
To the end of the film some codes are broken, a lot are not and Babel’s dream seems to be out of reach.