Babel-movie review

Babel is the last wedge of the trilogy of the death of Gonzalez Inarritu. It’s a film full of emotional content,  that brings the enormous difficulty of the human being to the light in the relationship with the other people and in particular way with the different cultures. The connection of tragic events, tied up among them from a thin thread conductor, is only the fuse that makes what was already present in the mind of the protagonists explode: fear, anger, distrust. Hope and trust in man are put to hard test but they never die entirely.

In Morocco an error of two little boys pushed by the irresponsibility of the age and by the boredom of the mountain’s life strikes an American couple in crisis and the accident is transformed in an international case and in a monster’s hunting. In Tokyo a deaf-mute girl, with only her father to try to help her, spends her days with friends covetously looking forward to meeting with the other sex, as it was a spell to break her pain. From America to Mexico the location of the last story in which a governess is forced to bring the two children given in custody to her over the border to attend the marriage of her son.

Three plots intersect, one connected to the other. The same test for all the protagonists: communication. Not with words, not with gestures, but with the heart. The evocative photography and the masterful soundtrack are in a perfect accord with the theme of the film: the silence that begins from the desolate mountains, and continues in the metropolis where it becomes even deafening in some scenes with Chieko, the Japanese protagonist, who finds herself living stunning adolescent situations in the loneliness of her silence. Skyscrapers and desolate moors, throat-cut roosters and top brands clothes, the film opens a space among reality, places and different cultures. The communication results impossible and the frightened soul of man ends up creating monsters and stereotypes. Babel as Babel where God chose to remove the language to prevent man from creating the great project of the tower. Without it we won’t be other than animals and the film reminds us of this in all three stories.

Amedeo Sebastiani