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Spilt popcorn - Great in any language
Volume 50, No. 1, February 8, 2007
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SPEECHLESS:
A deaf teenager struggles for acceptance in Babel.
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Babel
Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Adriana Barraza,
Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble, Rinko Kikuchi, and Kôji Yakushoa
Four separate families from different countries find their lives affecting
each other, as circumstances conspire with often devastating consequences
in Babel.
Set in the US, Mexico, Morocco and Japan, the story begins on a Moroccan
mountain-top, where the two sons of an impoverished goat herder pass the
time testing the range of a rifle their father bought to protect the flock
against jackals.
As Richard (Brad Pitt) and his wife Susan (Kate Blanchett) travel along
a mountain road while on holiday in Morocco, Susan is shot through the
window of their tour bus.
Severely wounded, Susan is left with Richard in a remote village to wait
for an air evacuation that is hampered by political unrest in the region.
The bullet that was fired by the boys came from a rifle originally given
to a mountain guide by a Japanese hunter.
The same Japanese man is now coming to terms with the loss of his own
wife, and with being the sole parent for his deaf and mute teenage daughter
who is struggling to find acceptance and her own place in the world.
While all this is transpiring, unbeknown to Richard and Susan, the nanny
caring for their two small children at home in the US, has decided to
take the children to a family wedding across the border in Mexico.
What begins as a positive, yet eye-opening, cross-cultural experience
for the children, suddenly becomes deadly when they become separated and
lost in the desert.
Overall, this ambitious storyline has been wonderfully put together and
makes a truly interesting plot as interpreters, sign language and sub-titles
conspire to tell this intriguing and different tale.
– SGT Damian Griffin
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