Babel (film)


Babel is a 2006 psychological drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga. It stars an ensemble cast. The multi-narrative drama completes Arriaga's and Iñárritu's Death Trilogy, following Amores perros and 21 Grams. It is an international co-production among companies based in the United States, Mexico and France. The film portrays multiple stories taking place in Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the United States.
Babel was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where González Iñárritu won the Best Director Award. The film was later screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film opened in selected cities in the United States on 27 October 2006, and went into wide release on 10 November 2006. Babel won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for both Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza, winning for Best Original Score.

Plot

Babel has four main strains of actions and characters which are location based. The film is not edited in a linear chronological order, wherefore the summaries are simplified and ordered mainly via location and in the order of appearance.

Morocco

In a desert in Morocco, Abdullah, a goatherder, buys a.270 Winchester M70 rifle and a box of ammunition from his neighbor Hassan Ibrahim to shoot the jackals that have been preying on his goats. Abdullah gives the rifle to his two young sons, Yussef and Ahmed, and sends them out to tend to the herd. Ahmed, the older of the two, criticises Yussef for spying on their sister while she changes her clothes. Doubtful of the rifle's purported three-kilometer range, they decide to test it out, aiming first at rocks, a moving car on a highway below, and then at a bus carrying Western tourists. Yussef's bullet hits the bus, critically wounding Susan Jones, an American woman from San Diego who is traveling with her husband Richard on vacation. The two boys realize what has happened and flee the scene, hiding the rifle in the hills.
Glimpses of television news programs reveal that the US government considers the shooting a terrorist act and is pressuring the Moroccan government to apprehend the culprits. Having traced the rifle back to Hassan, the Moroccan police descend on his house and roughly question him and his wife until they reveal that the rifle was given to him by a Japanese man, and then sold to Abdullah. The two boys see the police on the road and confess to their father what they have done, believing at the time that the American woman has died of her wounds. The three flee from their house, retrieving the rifle as they go. The police corner them on the rocky slope of a hill and open fire. After Ahmed is hit in the leg, Yussef returns fire, striking one police officer in the shoulder. The police continue shooting, hitting Ahmed in the back, possibly fatally injuring him. As his father rages with grief, Yussef surrenders and confesses to the crimes, begging clemency for his family and medical assistance for his brother. Ahmed is taken away as Yussef looks on.

Richard/Susan

Richard and Susan are an American couple who came on vacation to Morocco to get away from and mend their own woes. The death of their infant third child, to SIDS, has strained their marriage significantly and they struggle to communicate their frustration, guilt, and blame; Richard has planned the vacation to make amends, but Susan remains paranoid and hostile. When Susan is shot on the tour bus, Richard orders the bus driver to the nearest village, Tazarine. There, a local veterinarian sews up Susan's wound to stem the loss of blood. Richard contacts the US embassy to request an ambulance. The other tourists wait for some time, but they eventually demand to leave, fearing the heat and that they may be the target of further attacks. Richard tells the tour group to wait for the ambulance, which never arrives, and eventually the bus leaves without them. The couple stays behind with the bus's tour guide, Anwar, still waiting for transport to a hospital. Political issues between the US and Morocco prevent quick help, but eventually a helicopter arrives and carries Richard and Susan to a hospital in Casablanca, where she is expected to recover. Richard calls his children's nanny, Amelia, from the hospital, and they agree not to tell the children that Susan has been shot yet. Richard cries as his son tells him about his day at school, leading directly into the Mexico storyline.

United States/Mexico

Richard and Susan's Mexican nanny, Amelia, tends to their children, Debbie and Mike, in their San Diego, California home while they are in Morocco. When Amelia learns of Susan's injury, she is forced to take care of the children longer than planned and becomes worried that she will miss her son's wedding. Unable to secure any other help to care for them, she calls Richard for advice, who tells her that she has to stay with the children. Without his permission, Amelia decides to take the children with her to the wedding in a rural community near Tijuana, Mexico. Her nephew Santiago offers to take her and the kids to the wedding. They cross the border uneventfully and the children are soon confronted by the Mexican culture and street scene. The revelry of the wedding extends well into the evening, and the kids enjoy themselves in the festivities. Rather than staying the night in Mexico with the children, Amelia decides to drive back to the States with Santiago. He has been drinking heavily and the border guards become suspicious of him and the American children in the car. Amelia has passports for all four travelers, but no letter of consent from the children's parents allowing her to take them out of the United States. Intoxicated and worried, Santiago trespasses the border. He soon abandons Amelia and the children in the desert, attempting to lead off the police; his fate after this is unknown.
Stranded without food and water, Amelia and the children are forced to spend the night in the desert. Realizing that they will all die if she cannot get help, Amelia leaves the children behind to find someone, ordering them not to move. She eventually finds a US Border Patrol officer. After he places Amelia under arrest, she and the officer travel back to where she had left the children, but they are not there. Amelia is taken back to a Border Patrol station, where she is eventually informed that the children have been found and that Richard, while outraged, has agreed not to press charges. However, she is told she will be deported from the US where she has been working illegally. Her plea that she has been in the US for 16 years and has looked after the children for their entire lives does not secure lenient treatment. Amelia meets her son on the Mexican side of the Tijuana crossing, still in the red dress she wore for the wedding, now torn and dirty from her time in the desert.

Japan

Chieko Wataya is a rebellious, deaf Japanese teenage girl, traumatized by the recent suicide of her mother. She is bitter towards her father, Yasujiro Wataya and boys her age. She starts exhibiting sexually provocative behavior, partly in response to dismissive comments from a member of her volleyball team. While out with friends, Chieko finds a teenage boy attractive, and following an unsuccessful attempt at socialising, exposes herself to him under a table. Chieko encounters two police detectives who question her about her father. She and her friends take ecstasy pills in public and attend a rave. Chieko sees one of her friends kissing another boy whom she had spent the evening flirting with, and leaves the party alone.
She invites one of the detectives, Kenji Mamiya, back to the high-rise apartment that she shares with her father. Wrongly supposing that the detectives are investigating her father's involvement in her mother's suicide, she explains to Mamiya that her father was asleep when her mother jumped off the balcony and that she witnessed this herself. The detectives are actually investigating a hunting trip Yasujiro took in Morocco. Soon after learning this, Chieko approaches Mamiya nude and attempts to seduce him. He resists her approaches but comforts her as she bursts into tears. Before he leaves, Chieko writes him a note, indicating that she does not want him to read it until he is gone.
Leaving the apartment, Mamiya crosses paths with Yasujiro and questions him about the rifle. Yasujiro explains that there was no black market involvement; he gave his rifle as a gift to Hassan Ibrahim, his hunting guide on a trip in Morocco. About to depart, Mamiya offers condolences for the wife's suicide. Yasujiro, however, is confused by the mention of a balcony and angrily replies that his wife shot herself, and that Chieko was the first to discover her. After leaving, Mamiya stops at a bar to read Chieko's note. The note's contents are not revealed, though he later sees on the news that Susan was discharged from the hospital after five days. Chieko is leaning on the balcony nude when her father enters the apartment, and the two embrace as she breaks down in tears, ending the film.

Themes

Miscommunication

As the title of the movie suggests, a major topic is miscommunication. Babel goes back to the biblical story, where God punishes people by taking away their shared language and thus, their ability to communicate with each other, resulting into chaos and hostility among them. Most of the characters in the movie are connected by not only having to deal with language barriers but also their inability to properly communicate their feelings and wishes, which then leads to complicated turns, trouble and pain.
For example: The miscommunication between Richard and Susan leads to them being in Morocco. The miscommunication between Richard and Amelia leads to her taking the kids to Mexico. The miscommunication between Amelia's nephew and the police officer at the border leads to Amelia being deported.

Globalization

The movie shows how the actions of one person on one continent can affect the lives of other people on different continents and vice versa. It shows how travel, news, telecommunication, and other symptoms of the globalization maximize the magnitude of actions across the globe and how people, who would usually have no contact with each other are connected not only by actions but also by things. Also, Babel portrays through its narration the simultaneous developments of incidents across borders, countries and space, in general. Characters are also linked through time, something that can be perceived only now, thanks to the rapid communication that is developing in a globalized world.
The film also comments on the negative effects tourism can have in poverty-stricken countries and how difficult tourism and foreign politics can become when catastrophes occur.
Again, the title of the movie Babel reinforces the notion of globalization, as the characters communicate in different languages, not necessarily with each other, but across borders, which is only possible due to globalization.

Babel as a Network Narrative

Babel can be analyzed as a network narrative in which its characters, scattered across the globe, represent different nodes of a network that is connected by various strands. The movie not only incorporates quite a large number of characters but they also are, as is typical for network narratives, equally important. It is noticeable that Babel has multiple protagonists who, as a consequence, make the plot more complex in relation to time and causality.
One of the central connections between all of the main characters is the rifle. Over the course of the movie, the viewer finds out that Yasujiro Wataya visits Morocco for a hunting trip and gifts the rifle to his guide, Hassan Ibrahim, who then sells it to Abdullah from where it gets passed on to his sons. Susan Jones, in turn, is shot with that very same rifle which also has a tragic impact on Amelia Hernández' life. It is observable that "all characters are affected by the connections created between them – connections that influence both their individual trajectories as characters and the overall structure of the plot".
It shows how a single object can serve as a connection between many different characters who don't necessarily need to know each other. Even though the rifle is not passed on any further, it continues to influence the characters' lives in significant ways. This demonstrates how the smallest actions on one side of the world can ultimately lead to a complete change of another person's life elsewhere, without there being any form of direct contact between the two.
It also creates a small-world effect, in which "characters will intersect again and again" either directly or indirectly and mostly by accident. As Maria Poulaki observes, characters in network narratives "meet and separate not because of the characters' purposeful actions but as an outcome of pure chance". They serve the overarching plot that is rife with fatalistic overtures.

Cast

;Morocco
;United States/Mexico
;Japan
Babels $25 million budget came from an array of different sources and investors anchored with Paramount Vantage.
Actress Adriana Barraza, who plays the role of Amelia, is a two-time survivor of minor heart attacks. She nonetheless carried actress Elle Fanning around in the hot desert of Southern California during the summer for five days during filming.
Filming locations included Ibaraki and Tokyo in Japan, Mexico, Morocco, the US state of California, and Drumheller in the Canadian province of Alberta.
Principal photography began on 2 May and wrapped on 1 December 2005. After its completion, director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga had a falling-out regarding the authorship of their previous film, 21 Grams. Arriaga argued that cinema is a collaborative medium, and that both he and González Iñárritu are thus the authors of the films they have worked on together. González Iñárritu claimed sole credit as the auteur of those same films, minimizing Arriaga's contribution to the pictures. Following this dispute, González Iñárritu banned Arriaga from attending the 2006 Cannes Film Festival screening of Babel, an act for which the director was criticized.

Music

The film's original score and songs were composed and produced by Gustavo Santaolalla. The closing scene of the film features "Bibo no Aozora" by award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. The musical score won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music. It was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.

Release

Babel was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. It was later screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. It opened in selected cities in the United States on 27 October 2006, and went into wide release on 10 November 2006.
When the film was released in Japan in 2007, several moviegoers reported queasiness during a scene in which Rinko Kikuchi's character visits a nightclub filled with strobe lights and flashing colors. In response, distributors administered a health warning describing the scene.

Box office performance

Released in seven theaters on 27 October 2006, and then released nationwide in 1,251 theaters on 10 November 2006, Babel grossed $34.3 million in North America, and $101 million in the rest of the world, for a worldwide box office total of $135.3 million, against a budget of $25 million. Babel is the highest-grossing film of González Iñárritu's Death Trilogy, both in North America and worldwide.

Critical response

Babel received generally positive reviews. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 69% based on 199 reviews, with an average rating of 6.73/10, making the film a "Fresh" on the website's rating system. The critical consensus states that "In Babel, there are no villains, only victims of fate and circumstance. Director Alejandro González Iñarritu weaves four of their woeful stories into this mature and multidimensional film." At Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 69/100, based on 38 reviews, which indicates "Generally favorable reviews".
Film critic Roger Ebert included Babel in his The Great Movies list, stating that the film "finds Inarritu in full command of his technique: The writing and editing moves between the stories with full logical and emotional clarity, and the film builds to a stunning impact because it does not hammer us with heroes and villains but asks us to empathize with all of its characters."
The film received seven Academy Award nominations, winning one.

Home media

On 20 February and 21 May 2007, Babel was released on DVD by Paramount Home Entertainment in the United States and the United Kingdom respectively. On 25 September 2007, Paramount re-released the film as a two-disc special edition DVD. The second disc contains a 90-minute 'making of' documentary titled Common Ground: Under Construction Notes. Babel has also been released on the high-definition formats, HD DVD, and Blu-ray Disc.
On its first week of release on DVD in North America, Babel debuted #1 in DVD/Home Video Rentals. Total gross rentals for the week, were estimated at $8.73 million. In the first week of DVD sales, Babel sold 721,000 units, gathering revenue of $12.3 million. By April 2007, 1,650,000 units had been sold, translating to $28.6 million in revenue. In July 2008, its US DVD sales had totaled $31.4 million.

Accolades