For my my graduate seminar Mundo inmundo: Unworlding, Survivance, and the Cinema, my students and I will be posting weekly short film reviews on IMDB of an eclectic sample of Latin American and Luso-African films that in some way or another turn the page on “world cinema” and rather embody a novel kind of “regionalism” in response to what amounts to quite literally the end of the world as a planetary historical and geological horizon.
First, though, it’s necessary to explain what’s wrong with “world cinema”, and the film I’ve picked for this is González Iñàrritu’s 2006 Babel (see below). I will continue posting my own reviews here as well!
A Tower of Vacuousness
It’s hard to tell if this 2.5-hour slog of cascading narrative trainwrecks actually believes its own tone of weighty self-importance or if its appeal to transnational cinema’s penchant for tearful, politically vacuous arthouse fare is just calculated cynicism. My money is on cluelessness although the number of festival awards reaped by this pretentious time-waster might point to the latter. González Iñárritu and Arriaga (his scriptwriter since Amores perros) actually seem to think their “flapping-of-a-butterfly’s-wing-in-China-causing-a-hurricane-in-Cuba” continent-hopping really makes an important point about “globalization” and its discontents.
Only that, in this case, it’s actually a rifle shot by two teenage boys in rural Morocco, in a game turned awry, complicating childcare arrangements in the southern U.S. borderlands for the white U.S. tourist couple that happens to be in the way and, by extension, a wedding ceremony in Baja California, not to mention a young Japanese teenager’s sexual coming-of-age impacted, well – not really by any of the above, safe for the fact that her recently widowed, safari-hunting father was the aforementioned rifle’s previous owner.
The plot twists taping together these storylines are laborious and increasingly belief-straining — never more so than the couple’s nanny’s frustrated attempt to re-cross the U.S. border turning into a nightly car chase and near-death of herself and the children in the desert heat. Yet the anti-climactic outcome of it all is reassuringly conventional: while Americans and Japanese get away with a good scare that, all in all, “brings them together as a family”, the Moroccans and Mexicans end up either dead, deported, or (as Gael García Bernal’s playboy nephew) disappeared from the narrative altogether, most probably to no good. The problem is that –with the sole exception of Chieko, the deaf-mute Japanese girl played in a show-stealing performance by Rinko Kikuchi— the film’s interest in its characters is just as inch-deep as in the political and economic underpinnings of the uneven geopolitical frameworks linking their stories. Remarkably, even the Mexican wedding oozes tourist-postcard exoticism and stereotype no less than the Moroccan village episodes. The editing is just routine splicing-together of hand-held “close-to-the-action” and panoramic shots situating us in “majestic” (if “dangerous”) landscapes that we have become used to from quality TV; the acting is mostly uninspired to cringeworthy (how bad a director do you have to be to make Cate Blanchett look wooden?). Again, the one exception are some of the Japanese sequences, almost as if they were part of a different flick that somehow shipwrecked on the shores of this one. There is, in the end, nothing particularly Babelian about this movie (not even in linguistic terms: I’ve seen shorter ones managing to pack more idioms than English, Arabic, Spanish and Japanese). Its problem is not a towering excess of ambition but more a bottomless lack of purpose.
Verdict: 2 out of 10.
Jens Andermann 