Let me warn you, it is such a real life like, utterly disturbing movie. I almost puke on couple of scenes. I continued to Babel after about a hour break after finishing up Bhagam Bhag and it erased away all the laughs and fun that was with Bhagam Bhag.
We watched Babel yesterday at a Preview Release screening at Fun Republic. It is being released India Wide today. The movie is about confusion over different languages, the inability to communicate effectively between different languages. “The whole earth was of one language, and of one speech … Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven … And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built … Come, let Us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” — from Genesis 11.1-9
The movie revolves around an incident in the sands of the Moroccan desert. A rifle shot that created a chain reaction of events from an American tourist couple, two Moroccan boys, a Mexican nanny of two American children and a Japanese deaf-mute teenager. Prepare yourself to shatter emotionally for almost 2 and half hour with the Babel drama. You may get tensed, relentless and sometimes difficult to watch.
Babel is about 6 families, unknown to each other, spread across 4 countries on 3 continents and their inability to communicate. In the Moroccan desert, a man bargains and buys a Winchester rifle from his neighbor to keep away the jackals feeding on his goats. The rifle was gifted by a Japanese hunter as a gesture of thanks to his neighbor for being a helpful guide. The 2 teenage sons of the buyer carries the rifle while herding their goats to protect against the jackals. While playing, the teenagers end up firing at a tourist bus which eventually hit Susan (Cate Blanchett) by mistake. What followed is the plight of her husband Richard (Brad Pitt) who was traveling with her in an attempt to make their marriage work after the death of one of their child.
While Richard does everything to help his wife, calling up the US Embassy and a call to his home in San Diego where his faithful and long time maid Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is looking after their other 2 children. Amelia too wanted to cross the border into Mexico to attend his son’s wedding. She took the 2 children along as she had nobody else to take care of the kids. The shooting, however, escalates into an issue where the US security believed that terrorists was responsible for the shoot-out.
In the backdrop of this drama is the story of a deaf-mute teenager Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) who is recovering from the loss of her mother who committed suicide and was neither in a good term with her father. She is also going through the phase of adolescence frustrations. The movie weaves a binding story between all these and how they are related.
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