Iñárritu : Babel

Michael Wood reviews Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel, at LRB (25.01.2007) :

Meanwhile in San Diego the children are in bed, and the nanny, Amelia, brilliantly, warmly played by Adriana Barraza, is getting ready to cross over into Mexico the next day for her son’s wedding. Her nephew Santiago, played by Gael García Bernal, like Barraza a veteran of Amores Perros, is going to pick her up and drive her there. The snag is that the person who was going to stay with the children doesn’t make it, and Amelia can’t find anyone else to stand in for her. She decides to take the children to the wedding. And in Japan Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), one of the volleyball-playing girls, is feeling sulky and rejected, and hopes to cheer herself up with a night on the town and perhaps lose her virginity. So we’re all set. Boys in trouble, wounded woman stranded in a Moroccan village miles from any hospital, American children kidnapped with the best of intentions, and a Japanese teenager popping pills and drinking whisky, ready for a fall.

This is where the nightclub scene occurs. It looks conventional at first: crowds, noise, faces, gaudy colours. Then the colours fade a little, the images become almost abstract. Chieko is suddenly not having a good time, not laughing, not with the boy she thought was hers. She is all alone in this hurly-burly, and we see her solitary, angry face as if it were the only real thing in the world of the movie. Then, three times in a row, the soundtrack cuts out and comes back, so that we suddenly experience Chieko’s world as she does and just as suddenly leave it, and we try to get our heads around the idea of being deaf in a disco. She’s not alone because she’s deaf; but our momentary seeming deafness is a model of solitude, hers and many other kinds.

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Also see "Borders fall as the academy reaches around the globe" by John Horn and Gina Piccalo at Calendarlive.com (24.01.2007).