Babel

Poster for Babel. | Google Images

Four stories from around the world all linked into a movie of high artistic calibre. Babel is a multi-narrative film, plot-oriented, greatly influenced by the complexity of time, which showcases communication (miscommunication) from four different stories in a global scale. We all know of the story of the Tower of Babel and the humanity’s attempt to reach God but failed and were scattered all over the earths with different languages. The film retold the story by means of a more personal multi-narrative involving four races of humanity.

It all began with the rifle. Somehow, in time complex, these four stories were connected. USA, Mexico, Morocco, and Japan; a rifle was shot, a woman was hit, and they are interconnected. The construction of such connection is a feat itself. It wasn’t mind-boggling as it should have been but the feature of a multi-narrative resulted into a smooth and clear connection which other films would translate into audience’s confusion. Babel used the characters as agents to explain the connection among the four stories. The result was a concise and clear shift of setting from Chieko to Amelia to the Moroccan kids to the Americans. It avoided the general effect of “what is going on?” when a film uses a multi-narrative approach. The interconnected stories were the stronghold of Babel.

Time became a major catalyst in the progress of the film, to point on how the plot was presented. The viewers had a sense of following. The story happened for a span of five hours and each setting would have been chaotic if not for the element of time which was distinctive in many scenes. The film implanted a sensation that every setting happened at the same time (with variations on specific hours). The plot, however, does not coincide with the exact sequence of the events of the film. One such variation was visible when Richard Jones (Brad Pitt), after taking his wife to the hospital, called his kids at home where Amelia was working and gave us the conclusion that the Mexican set happened after all the other settings.

There are also representations that explain to the audience why such things occur. We can have the hunting portrait as an example. In there were Hassan Ibrahim (the seller of the rifle) and Chieko’s father (the original owner of the rifle). The relation of such portrait made us conclude of the connection of the Japan setting to the Moroccan setting.

The four stories show victims of pure circumstance richly presented by scenes that tell us what is going on and how it relates to the other. Babel is a gem of the multi-narrative and creative storytelling.