WEDNESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2008:

HESWALL HALL            7.45 pm.

Doors open at 7.00 pm.

BABEL

Cert. 15            Running Time: 143 minutes  (Part subtitled)

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu.

With: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, Gael Garcia Bernal, Rinko Kikuchi.

Iñárritu has now completed a trilogy of films dealing with human relationships constrained by the shackles imposed by society. Amores Perros was set in Mexico, his country of origin, and 21 Grams reflected his promotion to the wider horizons of the USA. In Babel, he and his screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga (The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada), have expanded those horizons to a global scale. As befits the title, the film employs four languages, and it also uses the technique of multiple story-lines and overlapping time scales. The message is deliberately bleak and at its most obvious is that lack of understanding, not only between countries, but between social classes, is a world-wide problem made worse, not better, by the establishment of the global village. The dramatic intensity of the film reveals that fear is the real driving force of this lack of understanding – fear of the unknown, fear of the different. Moroccan and Mexican peasants are afraid of poverty and authority, the Moroccan authorities are afraid of US disapproval, the US authorities are afraid of anti-American feeling and terrorism, the well-off are afraid that their comfortable lives can be disrupted or even destroyed by the actions of others or even by their own decisions.

The story begins with a simple innocent action by two children in Morocco which has catastrophic results for two Americans on holiday there and their young children left in the States. It even involves an apparently unconnected father and daughter in Japan. Although the film has plenty of tense action sequences, the emotional responses and the humanity of the characters are always to the fore. The acting is excellent throughout. The concern which is generated for the unwitting victims of the affair, as well as initial ones, is a tribute to this.

What they said about Babel:

“The result is terrific cinema, built on across-the-board great performances, searing imagery, heart-stopping moments and surprising flashes of humour, all coalescing into a raw vision of a world in tatters. Babel remains emotionally bruising but compulsive viewing”– Ian Freer, Empire.

 “Some will think this film glib and overly schematic. I found it an impressive, beautifully acted work with a tragic sense of life. The formality of its structure controls a seething anger.” – Philip French, The Observer.

“Iñárritu keeps all the narrative plates spinning at the same time with great élan, punctuating the dolefulness with some terrifically affirmative scenes.”

– Sukhdev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph.