Babel

Category: Movies

I didn't know what to expect out of Babel, having gone into the theatre for no greater reason than a free afternoon and a preview of a mellow aged Brad Pitt. From the start I knew it was a movie ideally watched by my lonesome, because I had a feeling it would be boring to my husband.

First of, the movie is brilliantly scored, with superb musical and sound accompaniment (with the marked absence of it in certain parts), that brought clarity and coherence to the theme of the movie. Immediately there are four isolated stories playing out that are seemingly disconnected, but gave one an inkling that they would significantly intersect somewhere.

I watched out for an edifice (or its metaphor) that would explain the title (my mind was thinking the biblical tower), which assuredly came at the end of the movie, in shiny glass and steel, but not before my PDA dictionary revealed to me that Babel, apart from the biblical tower, meant 'a confusion of voices and other sounds', which then I recalled came as a consequence to man's sinful pride of the tower.

Immediately it sunk into my gut, the loneliness of our planet, with six billion people connected, allegedly, by only six degrees of separation, which sounds strikingly close, yet isolated in a sense, in a world so reactive yet estranged as before. Language clearly isn't the only big barrier, but the indifferent hearts of people, just as much. Could it be the effect of progress? A sense of entitlement? No one could have played that out more than Richard and Susan Jones (the characters of Brad and Cate Blanchett), these touring American couple, with the wife, being so squeamish and repugnant of the third-worldliness, who later became the accidental victim of some unfortunate child's play. A single gunshot that pierced through their tourist bus and into her neck changed everything in an instant, where the couple found themselves now at the care of dark-eyed foreigners, who proved to be more civilized and compassionate than their brutally cold and uncaring first-worldly co-travellers.

Watch this movie to know what I'm talking about. Then be prepared for stunning visuals, with striking juxtapositions of progress and want, celebration and suffering, silence and babel, plus a superbly rendered night-club scene, and the beautiful but melancholic passion of matured love (with heart-rending performance by Adrianna Barraza who played the Mexican nanny), which makes this movie as one memorable and worthy of an Oscar in my books.