Babel

AroView: A bold, virtuoso three-peat for the writer-director team behind AMORES PERROS and 21 GRAMS, grafting a biblical parable of ill communication onto the despairing lives of four families across three continents with galvanizing results.

Typified by screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s penchant for interlocking triptychs, the film begins with a Moroccon boy using a tourist bus as rifle practice, injuring an American couple whose children, meanwhile, are being smuggled against permission by their nanny into Mexico. Further afield in Tokyo, a detached father struggles to connect with his promiscuous deaf-mute daughter in the film’s most emotionally devastating story. Dir. Innaritu displays considerable skill by weaving vastly disparate threads into a pertinent, surging ‘God’s view’ of global discord, even if the pathos does sometimes feel a little forced. Unlike the similar but inferior CRASH, though, this does not patronize with an ignorant ‘black and white’ perspective on the human race.