This is not a perfect film but this is the film I feel more satisfied being an audience recently. After all, this is a beautifully captured motion picture correctly appraised in the last Cannes festival. As the third episode of Alejandro González Iñárritu, the work reinforces the language of Iñárritu in the current film world...the name of the work is Babel, a Hebrew icon of the classical myth about the trait of human arrogance and miscommunication. The story is tragically true. Every cog of misunderstanding and dramatic coincidence, the world of people melts in the chain of reaction that is chaoticised with a lack of recognition and tolerance. It is an ambitious work. Like the project of Babylon, the multi-cultural clash happened in the every day of the era of globalisation results in comprehension as well as disappointment. Humans are still as irrational as they used to be. The sense of facing the question could be helpless. The film has an intrinsic kaleidoscopic overview from the western world on the people of other cultures that they may not understand a lot. Iñárritu and Arriaga, the script writer, chose four origins, America, Morocco, Mexico and Japan. The choice appears to be diplomatic. All the visual images of the exotic world to the Americans were panoramically shot in the film. The metropolitan life of Tokyo was nicely filmed, and it seems to be an echo to Sophie Coppela's lost in translation, and a use of the deaf character in the film was smart. It minimises the risk of stereotyping an impression of Japan to the Western world, as the focus was put more on the character and the alienation of people in the neon-light city. It was a very good part of story in the film indeed. The Mexican wedding party was comparatively a less important storyboard for Iñárritu in Babel, sensibly predictable since the film for him does not aim at depicting life and view of his own nation. And accordingly, Gael Garcia Bernal has limited space to act in the film.
The incidence in the part of Morocco was cohesively made. It was to me an impact portrait of the mis-link nowadays as a result of the unthoughtful Americanism and the interest of resources and power between the nations. Astonishingly presented, it was the moment of helplessness in the film. With a landscape of natural desert and emotionless breeze of sand and dust, it tells all of Babel. The music in the film was very nice too. The only flaw of the story is the pick of Morocco as the spot of the incidence. It flips the vision and simplifies the various cultures and difference that exist in the region of Maghreb and the Middle East. People speak not only Arabic or French but sometimes English too. The beauty of the post-Babylon world is that we have countless types and forms of languages to exchange and describe about the world, but a fact for our age is that there exists an ignorance of modern people to retain this beauty together with a cliché attempt to simplify old time civilisation with an easily adopted monopolised world, or some people called a "common" world. I have no attempt to refute globalisation or collective action, but there is a need to think about the existing execution means we are having in our world. The film ends in a simple wish, 'there is the brightest light in the darkest night'.
