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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Mexican wave. Forty-three-year-old Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu says of his new film Babel, “This is the end of a trilogy that I started with Amores Perros and 21 Grams, exploring the relationships between parents and children. Locally in Amores Perros, then in a foreign way in 21 Grams and now on a global scale. How those intimate stories can be explored and, at the same time, reflect how the world and cultures can clash and not understand each other… For me it now means the end of a project I started nine years ago.” It’s a strange way of grouping these films, which are not a trilogy in the sense that they feature the same characters in a continuation of a single story. Amores Perros, alongside Y Tu Mama Tambien, kicked off the recent international love affair with Mexican film, but it’s for the dogs rather than the parents and children that I remember it. And 21 Grams was memorable for the tagline about representing the weight of a soul. Like all his films, Babel sees Iñárritu waving his filmmaking wand by interlocking stories in three different locations: Morocco, Japan and the border between Texas and Mexico. It’s this narrative device that seems to be the uniting theme, rather than the family bonds.  Of all the films, Babel is the one where parent-child relationships are most prominent. A father’s despair at his mischievous kids firing a gun, a father trying to reassure his children that their injured mother will be fine, and a father trying to bring up a mute daughter traumatised by the suicide of her mother. In telling these stories, Iñárritu brilliantly manages to voice his anger at the state of the world. The reactions of Americans to a shooting in Morocco being the most obvious example of a globe living under the spectre of terrorism and a solitary world power. Over the years, Iñárritu has honed his technique of interconnecting narratives, from three stories being told one after another in Amores Perros to the brilliant slicing back and forth of Babel. This film is remarkable as each section is completely different, yet it forms a tangible whole. The best of the bunch is about the alienated mute in Japan, while the worst is the cross-border shenanigans which has been done many times before. It is though, by far, Iñárritu’s most accomplished work.
Kaleem Aftab
Babel, on national release 19 January 07.
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