Babel

Caught a preview screening of this film yesterday courtesy of The Guardian.

It's the new film by the team that brought us 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams'. Like the two earlier films, 'Babel' interlinks a number of seemingly disparate story lines and as the film progresses you slowly discover the links that join them together. There are four stories in this film; an American couple are involved in a life-threatening accident while abroad, a Mexican woman wants to get to her son's wedding, two Moroccan boys play around with a hunting rifle and a deaf-mute girl in Japan is trying to get over the death of her mother. As you can see from the descriptions this is a global film, but the stories are all linked.

The film is beautifully shot, taking advantage of the stark contrast in the different locations. One moment you're in the desolate Moroccan desert and the next you're in a busy Japanese cityscape. There are some moments of real directorial flair; two stand-outs scenes are the Mexican wedding and a sequence in a Japanese nightclub where you cut from being able to hear the music to having just the visuals, giving you a sense of the deaf character's point of view. Which leads me onto something I really liked about the film - Rinko Kikuchi's performance; despite not actually being deaf, I thought she was very convincing. And of the story threads in the film, this was for me the most engaging.

The biggest disappointment about the film was the device that links all the stories, it felt very tenuous and unnecessary. The stories would have worked better as separate entities, the need to join them - as per the director's previous films - I felt diminished the power of the film. The actors seemed underutilised - Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael García Bernal have all been better and were poorly served by the fact that they were only in smaller segments of a larger film. At least we do get to see Brad do his trademark 'frantic' (see 'Twelve Monkeys', 'Se7en', etc) at one point in the film.

Ultimately, I'm not sure if I enjoyed the film or if I think it is pretentious twaddle... A case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts.

Question: Can anyone tell me, what is the piece of music that is used during the helicopter scene?