Cinema - Babel

A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, and the New York stock market flounders. A young shepherd takes a pot shot at a tourist bus in Morocco and a deaf girl’s life in Tokyo is irrevocably changed. Babel, the latest film by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, follows the same plot device that made his first two efforts - Amores Perros and 21 Grams - so successful. One violent event affects the lives of several seemingly random groups of people. His first film took place in Mexico City, his second in locations throughout the United States. In this case the plot unwinds all around the world, from North Africa to Mexico, via Japan and LA.

Babel is rich in acting talent (mainly from the lesser known actors involved) and rich in wonderful cinematography, too. It is always visually stimulating, and never boring. But it is fundamentally flawed. You keep thinking ‘that wouldn’t have happened’, which you don’t want to be doing in a realism-based arthouse movie. Your misgivings build up as the film progresses, and start to rankle. Eventually you realise that Babel doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts. Which is a great pity, because some of those parts make for stunning cinema, especially the Tokyo strand, which jumps off the screen. One day, Inarritu, clearly fed on a morning, noon and night diet of Robert Altman, will make a film which doesn’t need a number of irritatingly unlikely plot-moving McGuffins to make it work, and we will all be the better for it. DL