listen

If you want to be understood, listen. That is what Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu's latest film, Babel, wants us to get.

I got a pirated DVD copy of the film in a stall in one of the malls here. In stalls like these, they usually couldn't get the movie posters right, and Babel's poster was particularly disturbing. You have Brad Pitt's bod superimposed in the foreground of the real poster. Looks like he's some kind of harbinger of unity or something. But it's good to see he doesn't look like Brad Pitt in the film. Think Tom Cruise with the pepper-colored hair in Collateral only more haggard.

Just like Amorres Perros and 21 Grams, Inarittu seems to be enmeshed in the whole concept of humanity's interconnectedness and dependency that doing a horror might not be really soon for him and his writer-collaborator Guillermo Arriaga. If these partners continue to make movies like these, they could very well create an entire genre in drama. I heard of the news that the partners have parted ways after this movie.

The story is spurred by an accident which connected the lives of the characters, albeit the individual stories do not necessarily impact or make a moral argument of the other. Two Morrocan boys unintentionally shot Cate Blanchett in the neck on a travel bus and made Brad Pitt go berserk. The couple is on a soul-searching trip to save their marriage while leaving their kids to their Mexican nanny who carries them into the Mexico border because she has to attend his son's wedding. The rifle used by the two children was originally owned by a Japanese whose deaf-mute daughter hungry for love waves her 'hairy monster' in public just to get attention.

It is set in four countries: US, Morroco, Mexico and Japan. And you have unknown actors speaking in different languages as well. Fine performances from the deaf-mute Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza.

The melancholy is all the more stressed courtesy the Moroccan landscapes and Gustavo Santaolalla's score. Watching the vast scenery and listening to the painful guitar riffs feelt like I was watching Brokeback Mountain. Click here for reviews of Babel.