Babbling about "Babel"

The weather has been surprisingly nice for a whole week. It's Friday evening. The setting sun splashed different hues of orange on the ripples of Puget Sound. I walked to M's office taking my usual route along the waterfront, and turned onto Western Ave where I browsed furniture displays in windows, which has become a pleasant weekly routine for me.

The downtown traffic was crawling as always on a Friday evening. We decided to go to REI first to rent snowshoes, and only to find a dreadful long line at the rental counter. Then, we chose to leave without snowshoes to catch a movie at the Pacific Center and grab a plate of my favorite sweet potato fries at Tacone.

We watched "Babel," a movie directed by our favorite Mexican director, Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu. We had watched two other movies directed by him: "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams." It's said that these three movies complete a trilogy that Innaritu and the screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, set out to produce a few years ago. Among the three movies, "Babel" really stands out on many different levels: the cinematography, a plot that is cross-border and cross-cultural and a solid cast with both super stars and amateur unknown actors.

The title itself says a lot about the movie. The word "babel" means "confusion of sounds and voices." When written as "Babel" with a capitalized "b," it refers to the city (now thought to be Babylon) where the Tower of Babel was built in trying to reach Heaven; and it was said that God was offended by that and made people to speak different languages so that man can't understand each other. I'm no expert in religion. But I can see how this title is a smart choice.

The movie delivered that message very clearly - communicating across cultures, languages and gestures is no easy task. Even as a movie viewer, we are also naturally trapped in ongoing moments of "lost in translation" throughout the movie without being able to speak the respective languages firsthand.

This movie weaves in so many themes and asks so many questions all in one movie:

• Life styles differ from cultural to culture; yet how much of that difference is dictated by economic conditions, how much by political conditions, how much by culture itself. It seems rich countries seem to have a somewhat similar life style. Does poverty make a country and its people dangerous? Or is it something else?


• The pains and joy of growing up no matter where you are in four corners of the world (the lure of and curiosity about sex and the ethics around it...)


• How do we come to terms with losing loved ones (the couple's baby, the Japanese girl's mom, and towards the end the sheep herder's son...)


• Although the gun was a gift by a Japanese tourist to a local Moroccan hunter. It also raises the question: How do countries prevent weapons from spreading, or how does a country go about the issue of gun-control?


• The relationship between the police - the machine of a state - and the general populace (Moroccan police, Japanese police and US border patrol.) How do the police treat people (as enemy of the state?) whom they are supposed to protect?


• Our lives are so intertwined with each other, knowingly or unknowingly. Is globalization bringing us closer or sending us far apart along religious, spiritual and cultural lines?


• What kind of immigration policy should the US pursue?


• How can the world combat true terrorism without sacrificing civilian lives or civil liberty?

The movie ingeniously linked these themes across three different continents. After watching it, I find myself babbling from one subject to another...

Cozying up in front of "Breathless"

Blue sky, crispy air, squirrels hopping around and birds chirping - no obvious signs of a disastrous storm just the day before. Looking more closely, there are trees lying around with root balls dangling over gaping holes; many households - over 40,000 - are still without power. We got lucky: survived the storm with uninterrupted power and gas supply; our roof also endured the storm without leaking on us, although dozens of shingles got blown off.

Late Saturday morning, we were aware of our fortune of having power and heat on a winter day. Michael made crepes; and along with crepes, we cozied up and watched a French film, Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard. It was shot in 1960, and later became one of the most influential movies made during the French New Wave period. Since modern movies have absorbed many of the new editing techniques (e.g. jump cuts) and theories (e.g. "auteur theory") that the New Wave movies championed, as a modern viewer, I can't quite fully comprehend the revolutionary impact that this movie had on movies and directors of his time.

Like many other movies, this one deals with human existence, death, love and betrayal - subject matters of movies of all times. The plot is fairly simple: Jean-Paul Belmondo, a heartthrob French actor, played a thief who fell in love with an American girl who sold newspapers in Paris. The thief, Michel, killed a cop. From then on, he was on the run from the police. When betrayed by his American girlfriend, he didn't choose to flee from the police. The last scene was a protracted scene of him running away from the policemen who shot him, but it seems to me that he was trying to run away from his imminent death, or his love (maybe) not worthy of dying for. That was left ambiguous.

Actually, one thing that does strike me as something special is the way the movie portrayed the main character. The movie didn't portray, Michel, a thief as an evil person; instead, the movie presented an amoral picture of his being, his emotions and his philosophy of life. That seems to be a new exploratory concept rising out of the given historical period - reconstruction and rebuild after WWII. The director grew up during war times when the Axis armies were fight against the Allied Forces, the evil vs. the good. As a challenge to the black-and-white way of view of the world, an amoral portrayal of a real human being strikes a different cord blurring the moral lines.

On a different, yet related note, comments about American and French cultural differences in different scenes and conversations were an interesting reflection of the interactions that these two nations experienced during the after-war rebuild period. It appears to me America was a symbol of strength and independence, a word used a few times at different scenes in this movie.

There was a sweet sense of humor and naughtiness that added to our cozy ride throughout the movie. Even the seemingly painful ending was endearing. Admittedly, with 21th century viewers' lenses, I wasn't awed by the plot or the highly-praised revolutionary editing techniques used in this movie.