Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Babel

A choral story set between Morocco, Japan, and Mexico, with actors from almost every ethnicity, as if to emphasize that we are in the era of globalization, and we all have the power to influence (for better or worse) the course of events. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and the innovative screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, four years after the quirky editing of "21 Grams," return to tell a story of intertwined destinies in contemporary Babel, where everyone makes their frustration speak.

It all starts in the desert, where a Moroccan shepherd buys a rifle from a friend to fend off the jackals threatening his flock and entrusts it to his two children, just a little older than kids. The two brothers, Ahmed, the eldest, and Yussef, the sharpest, decide to test it by aiming at a bus advancing a kilometer away. It just so happens that this is a bus of American tourists, and the bullet hits Susan (a very troubled Cate Blanchett), on vacation, perhaps to mend a half marriage crisis, with her husband Richard (Brad Pitt). This event will simultaneously be the beginning and the focal point of a series of events with a tragic background.

We then move to California, where Amelia, the Mexican nanny of Susan and Richard's two young children, is telephoned about the drama and deprived of permission to go to Mexico for her son's wedding. Amelia decides to go anyway, defying Richard's ban, and takes the two children with her, escorted by her cocky nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal). From here, we move to Japan, where we follow the story of Chie-ko, a post-adolescent deaf-mute dealing with an unprocessed grief and her desire to be accepted by the male universe.

While the Mexican scenarios are immediately clear in their connection to Susan and Richard's Moroccan storyline, it takes longer to understand what the Japanese girl and her vicissitudes with males have to do with it. However, the film is pervaded by a realism that makes everything organic and believable, three stories (four if we consider the background on the Moroccan shepherd boys) that share, besides the rifle shot, the impossibility of communication in the post-9/11 world.

It is indeed evident the inability to understand each other when Richard's travel companions want to abandon him and the agonizing Susan because "it's not safe to stop in a remote village, the television said that..."; when Richard himself refuses to listen to Amelia's reasons, forcing her to miss her son's wedding; when Moroccan police brutally beat the shepherd who sold his rifle to a friend... In all this, Chie-ko, who is the most "privileged" in terms of geographical space and situational context, cannot communicate normally and bears this burden by trying to act as if nothing were wrong and moving on, without communicating even with herself.

The more tools we have to communicate, it seems, the less we manage to understand each other. And when communication is sacrificed for security, absurdity and pain prevail. Such as when the police engage in a shootout with the two shepherd boys barricaded behind the desert rocks (a metaphor for this lack of understanding) while trying to flee with their father. Or when the American border guard handcuffs and treats the desperate Amelia, who has lost the children in the desert (this time the Mexican one), as a terrorist. It is no coincidence that, in the end, the ones who pay the highest price are the most innocent—Ahmed, fatally shot by the police, and Amelia, expelled following Santiago's foolish reaction of forcing the checkpoint at the California border while drunk, returning from the wedding.

A very well-made film, perfect from a technical point of view and touching in its message. A great acting performance by Brad Pitt, never so three-dimensional, and really intense scenes, like the reconciliation with Susan, who, wounded and dying, realizes that the misunderstandings that led them there were trivial. The final scene, with the Japanese girl naked observing the nighttime panorama from her skyscraper balcony, best expresses the loneliness of the contemporary era, which, by giving up authentic communication, turns simple misunderstandings into real tragedies.

Inarritu thus creates a beautiful film, one of these new Mexico-Hollywood hybrids that best capture the anxieties and tensions of today's life, something "21 Grams" only partially achieved. A special mention to the soundtrack by the same author as "Brokeback Mountain". A must-see film, both for the truly evocative ethnic settings and for the intensity and relevance of the theme addressed.