“Babel” is director’s crescendoMexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s towering work, “Babel,” contains arguably the most ecstatic scene to grace the big screen this year.
A teenager walks into a pulsing, strobe-lit nightclub with friends in Tokyo. They have taken what’s likely Ecstasy, washing it down with whiskey.
Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September” simmers, then boils before bursting forth. Because Chieko is deaf and mute, the sound blinks off and on, and off and on again. It’s a powerful gesture that elicits your physical empathy before sending you away from the lonesome teen to enjoy the waves of sound.
Sight. Sound. Silence. Some of the very things that make film so powerful come at you in heart-rending, then celebratory, then shattering force. Is it any surprise González Iñárritu was once a radio deejay?
The biblically titled, globe- trotting movie, starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal, travels to Morocco, California, Tokyo, Mexico, the Sonoran desert and back again and again.
Had he not been on the move so much himself, said Iñárritu, this ambitious artwork about social dislocation but also deep human resonance might not have happened.
“We are completely connected and related and affected. I have experienced that myself, traveling so much,” said González Iñárritu, sitting at a picnic table off Telluride’s main street in early September. “We project ourselves on others and we are what the others are too,”
“Babel,” he said, completes a trilogy of complex narratives that began with his 2000 debut, “Amores Perros.” That movie, with its colliding tales of three very different kinds of Mexico City denizens, heralded the arrival of an uncommon and daring talent. It was also the brash sign of his creatively charged collaboration with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga.
Their next film was “21 Grams,” starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro as three people brought together by a hit-and-run tragedy. A car accident was the narrative catalytic converter in “Amores Perros,” too.
In “Babel,” a bullet from a hunting rifle handled by two boys in the dusty hills of Morocco binds the characters: a hurting American couple traveling in Morocco, a hardscrabble Muslim family, a Mexican nanny, a Japanese businessman and his daughter.
Tracing his movie’s gestation, the director said, “I think ‘Amores Perros’ came from the need to talk about Mexico City, which is such a convoluted, anthropological human experiment. Living there for 35 years at that time, I really needed to purge myself about all these different social classes and all this craziness and violence combined with mercy and how to survive that.”
The inspiration for “Babel,” he says, “was triggered from the fact that I am now out of my country. So many things that happen in one country, you realize three months later may beome a family tragedy in another country … that family will never know who affected them.”
“Babel” is, for the time being, the culmination of the González Iñárritu-Arriaga’s tag-team. “He wants to direct, which I think would be great for him,” Iñárritu said. “He’s producing another film.” (Last year, Arriaga, a former college professor, lent his rich storytelling to Tommy Lee Jones’ “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.”) “Maybe we’ll work together again, but we’ve come through an almost nine-year collaboration.”
It’s inviting to look at this last installment as the final working through of González Iñárritu and Arriaga’s stages of grief.
The two bonded when González Iñárritu’s infant son died in 1996; Arriaga had lost his 2-year-old nephew. “21 Grams” was about what the director and his wife went through when their boy died.
In “Babel,” the daughter of Pitt and Blanchett’s characters confides to her nanny that she’s afraid to die like her little brother. Adrian Barraza’s character tenderly explains that what happened to the infant couldn’t happen to her.
“That interests me a lot – having two children and having lost one,” said the filmmaker. “The infinite love that we feel at times, and the way we can’t express that or we fail to express or acknowledge, between parents and children.
Of the three, he thought “Babel” is the most hopeful. Because “in the end, no matter what, the parent will stand behind the child.”
