Iona Firouzabadi
posted 31 January 2007

'Babel' is a biblical myth. But it's also a confused noise. Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2007 Oscar contender Babel is lost in translation, somewhere between the director's grand vision and the smaller, clunkier reality of his movie.

Taking place across three continents, four stories and five languages, this is a film with a potentially monumental sweep, encompassing the divisions and bonds of culture, language, politics, law and love. As in Iñárritu's previous collaborations with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga - Amores Perros and 21 Grams - there are spliced-up multiple narratives told out of sync. Unfortunately this time round there are also significant flaws in the structure. We begin in the hills of Morocco. A young boy fires a rifle, testing his shooting skills. The bullet accidentally hits an American woman travelling in a tourist coach through the desert. From here the lives of a Moroccan village, an American couple, a Hispanic nanny and a Japanese girl are all drawn into relation.

Susan and Richard (Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt) are affluent, white Americans. They have marriage problems and they've come to Morocco in the hope of fixing things up. The majority of the film portrays them in a protracted moment of physical and emotional pain. Susan lies weak and bleeding on the floor of a village home. Richard desperately attempts to get a medical help to her - he becomes her carer. It's not glamorous and this film certainly isn't a star vehicle, despite having a dusting of starry names. The Moroccan stories work beautifully as a self-contained narrative and could easily have been turned into a full drama, developing further the anti-orientalist aesthetic and the take on the realpolitik of the US. But the other two narrative strands have marked problems.

The Japanese segment tells its story of youth culture, urban alienation and the world of a deaf girl (Rinko Kikuchi) skilfully - suddenly submerging you in her silent landscapes. But it's only spuriously connected to the other stories at its close - via the rifle that is fired thousands of miles away in Morocco. The connection is cheap, weak and annoying - the film would have been far better off had no link been drawn at all. But this awful structural decision pales by comparison to that of the Mexican story.

Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is a warm, middle-aged illegal immigrant, and nanny to Susan's and Richard's children. Her story becomes a melodrama, framed around border control and involving her crazy nephew, Santiago (Gael García Bernal) - more a plot device than a character. Amelia's story runs parallel to Susan's and Richard's from the start, though it's not immediately apparent that the two are intimately connected. Like her American employers, Amelia's downfall also comes in the desert - this time a Californian one, where she loses the children. The emotional extremity is just one step too far to believe. Why have Iñárritu and Arriaga made the children Susan's and Richard's? Theirs is one seriously unlucky family - so unlucky you stop believing in them, stop caring and disconnect from the story.

Thematically this narrative is a disaster. The film is set up as a piece about human dislocation and anguish. All the characters are in the wilderness, literally - whether it be city or desert. The film's title distils these very ideas. Then why make such an obvious, awkward connection between two of the stories? Surely this film would be far truer to its title, if its stories were connected by no more than being human narratives, rather than by the questionable links Iñárritu employs.

This is a film with beautiful, even profound parts. It looks great, its performances are great and it will hold your attention - even catch you up in its primal scream of emotion. But its whole is malformed and peculiarly vapid. It shrinks in the memory.