Babel

Our movie-going friends who moved to Antwerp this summer are in town for a few days, so we had to hit a serious film (the silly ones we rented from VideoWorld for a long film night tonight :). We chose Babel, which was showing with subtitles. It is in English, Mexican Spanish, probably Berber or Arabic, and Japanese.

This is not an amusing film. The director says it is about family. It seems to be about miscommunication and about everything being intertwined. Seemingly non-related families (each with their own private tragedy) are very tightly intertwined (the Japanese father gave a gun to a guy in Morroco who sold it to the father of the child who shot the American tourist).

Didn't figure out until the credits that the good-looking, manly hunk was *the* Brad Pitt. Well.

I found the portrayal of the Japanese teenage deaf girl to be quite interesting - it showed her using a videophone to communicate, something I had heard about and found hard to believe that you can see gestures without too much wiping on that small screen with that small bandwidth. The Japanese fascination for toys and bright lights was nicely portrayed, and also the loneliness one can feel in the city of millions.

The essence is rather like the Billy Joel song: The Russians (Mexicans/Americans/Japanese/Moroccans) love their children, too.