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Babel
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  Babel Production NotesTagline: Listen.
Armed with a Winchester rifle, two Morrocan boys set out to look after their family's herd of goats. In the silent echoes of the desert, they decide to test the rifle... but the bullet goes farther than they thought it would.
In an instant, the lives of four separate groups of strangers on three different continents collide. Caught up in the rising tide of an accident that escalates beyond anyone's control are a vacationing American couple (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett), a rebellious deaf Japanese teenager and her father, and a Mexican nanny who, without permission, takes two American children across the border.
None of these strangers will ever meet; in spite of the sudden, unlikely connection between them, they will all remain isolated due to their own inability to communicate meaningfully with anyone around them.
From Alejandro González Iñárritu comes a film that is at once intimate and epic, shot in four countries, cast with actors and non-actors, and concludes his trilogy that started with "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."
A larger-than-life film
Few times in film history have reality and fiction collided as they do in BABEL, Alejandro González Iñárritu¹s (“Amores Perros,” “21 Grams”) update of the Biblical myth that claims to be the origin of mankind's lack of communication.
Shot over the course of a year in three continents and involving a ensemble multi-lingual cast lead by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Koji Yakusho as well as a high percentage of non-professional actors from Morocco, Mexico and Japan, the film came to mean for all the people involved a physical and psychological journey very close to that portrayed by its characters. While the film tells the stories of people set adrift by cultural and idiomatic frontiers, both the director and his crew dealt with these same challenges months before the shooting started.
González Iñárritu, a self-claimed “director in exile,” has said that, first and foremost, the idea of BABEL is the result of having left his country and of his living-on-the-go current state of mind. “BABEL no longer answered the question, “Where am I from?” but rather, “Where am I heading?” Such was the personal approach to the question, that BABEL was in its origins a self-financed project.
In a departure from his two previous films, both shot in countries, settings and shooting conditions somehow manageable and familiar to the director, BABEL meant for González Iñárritu not only the deep involvement in a more complicated, emotional and intellectual journey, but a means of exploring other cultures and ways of seeing the world with a more complex film production. As is usually the case, the clashing of so many cultural points of view in both the ideological and in the physical ended up transforming not only his personal perspective on things but the creative process itself.
One of the director's main objectives was to avoid using an outsider point of view in telling the stories of characters born and raised in the cities portrayed. In order to achieve that, he followed what he calls an “observe and absorb” process. Aside from carefully watching the everyday habits of the locals, he chose to work with foreign non-professional actors who provided him with insight on cultural subtleties. In the ultimate challenge of telling the story from the characters and not the director's frame of mind, he let his first-time actors develop their own reactions to situations that might have a different meaning in every country. Many of them had never seen a film camera before.
Through the process of rehearsing highly emotional scenes in never spoken before languages and of finding the perfect shooting spot in places that ranged from a never ending desert to one of the most crowded cities in the world, BABEL came to prove its own plot thesis both in fiction and in real life: “Barriers and frontiers are not always physical and visible,” says González Iñárritu. “The lines are within us and prejudice exists within our cultural frames. In that same sense they can also be brought down.”
Such is the ordeal that the characters in the stories portrayed in Babel were meant to go through, and such was the life-changing experience of bringing those stories to the screen.
The heart of the matter
At the center of BABEL is the subject at the core of 21st century life: lack of communication. "On a conventional level (and conventions are sometimes useful to tell stories,) it can be said that BABEL is about miscommunication, but for me, at the bottom line, the film is about how vulnerable and fragile we are as human beings and when a link is broken, it's not the link that is rotten but the chain itself.”
By this he doesn´t mean the obvious definition of language barriers. “You don't have to be lost in the Morocco desert or in the middle of the Shibuya district to feel that you are isolated. The most terrifying loneliness and isolation is the one that we experiment with ourselves, our wives and our children,” explains Iñárritu. “For the third time, this is a story about parents and their children.“ With BABEL, he wanted to explore the contradiction between the popular perception that this is such a small world with apparently so many new tools of communication and the equally strong sense that humans still can't express and communicate with each other at the most fundamental levels.
“I wanted to try to capture the whole idea of human communication - its ambitions, its beauty and its problems --with one word,” he says of choosing BABEL to name his film, even though the title was picked after the screenplay was written. “I considered so many different titles, but when I thought of the story of Genesis, it made so much sense as a metaphor for the film. Each of us has his own different language, but I believe we all share the same spiritual spine.”
Having the idea of making a film with a cacophony of human voices before starting to shoot “21 Grams,” Iñárritu invited, once again, screenplay writer Guillermo Arriaga in order to conclude the trilogy which began with “Amores Perros” in the year 2000. “Arriaga's talent is extraordinary. His writing is profound and powerful. He has been an amazing collaborator, carving out four narratives that unravel in three disparate parts of the world.” One follows a troubled married American couple who find themselves fighting for their lives in the middle of what may or may not be a terrorist incident while vacationing in the Muslim country of Morocco, where the local language and culture are a constant riddle.
The paradox implied in the relationship between the characters portrayed by Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt is an example of a more intimate definition of miscommunication: “From the outside, they look like a couple who get lost in the desert, when in reality, they are a lost couple who find one another in their loneliness,” says the director. In a similar case of personal drama, the story of the two children involved in the accident is not so much about its outcome, but about the “moral collapse of a Muslim family strongly guided by spiritual principles,” who watch how these principles crumble to the ground once the events start to unfold.
A second tale revolves around a Mexican nanny working amidst the wealth of California, who makes the fateful decision to bring two American children illegally across the border. Her story is a fable that sums up the situation of thousands of people who try to cross the U.S. border, and face the double standard set by both Mexican and American governments. They become what the director calls “invisible citizens,” left to their destinies by both countries, in any case unprotected by proper immigration laws. “For me, living as an immigrant in the U.S., telling a story about the border wasn't a choice, it was a moral decision,” says Iñárritu.
A third story focuses on a widowed father, trying to emotionally connect with his deaf daughter in the middle of the intensely urban setting of Tokyo. The tale of a teenager who falls into sexual extremes as a way to make up for affection, ultimately expresses the need to develop a language. “When to touch or to be touched by words is not an option, then the body becomes an instrument, as a weapon or an invitation,” says the director.
Ultimately, Iñárritu contends that the language of film is one way that artists can break through the borders and miscommunication between people around the world: “I believe that languages can be like a mirage that misleads and confuses us. They can make us more suspicious of people we see as others. But I also think there's no tool more perfect for breaking away from the language barrier than powerful images and music. Images don't need translation because they trigger universal human emotions. Film is the closest to Esperanto as it gets.,“ says Iñárritu.
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Rinko Kikuchi in Babel.
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