CinemaDope

“BABEL”

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as Richard and Susan Gordon

 

“Babel” 2006
 w-Guilliermo Arriaga  d-Alejandro González Iñárritu

“Babel”, Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (“28 grams”)  is Four interlocking stories taking place simultaneously in three different locations on the planet.
Each story is touched  off by the other three, and the narrative flow of the film jumps back and forth in time, stitching the story together.
Here’s the plot, in a nutshell: (god help me)
Brad and Cate are vacationing in godforsaken Morocco.
Cate gets plugged in the neck by a .22 calibre rifle shot by two moron goatherder kids who live in the middle of butthole nowhere and have never heard of cause and effect.
This causes Brad and Cate (who by the way have two adorable blond children) to piss off their illegal Mexican immigrant nanny because they were suppose to be home in time for her to skedaddle back to godforsaken Mexico for her sons wedding. so…she takes the kids with her over the border, and her nephew who’s driving gets all drunk and evades the border guards and dumps the nanny and the kids into the middle of the sonoran desert, and she in her party dress and pumps and all.
So. it’s bad for Brad.
And Cate, who’s dying of blood loss and infection and the need to pee.
Meanwhile, over in Tokyo, this fucked up mute deaf Japanese girl gets all upset because no one wants to bone her. she has to do with Brad and co because her father sold the winchester rife to the idiot Moroccan when he was over there hunting yak or whatever.
Got it?
Iñárritu does weave a skillful and compelling story. I kept wanting to fast forward because I was so on the edge of my seat with suspense. Every time he cut back to the Tokyo story I wanted to scream and pull the screen down. The performances by …oh everyone who appears on the screen are flawless. Also interesting was Iñárritu’s shuffling of the narrative thread, with some incidents happening before or after others in different locations and how they all interconnect.
Except the Japanese bits.
They really don’t matter much and could have been left out. The cinematography is excellent, with some amazing composition which truly leaves the viewer really feeling the desolateness of the respective Mexican and Moroccan deserts. Please netflix this film at once.
Oh…
and Brad Pitt is HOT!

Like