Babel

A Westerner arriving in Tokyo is easily non-plussed. English doesn't work and no one is overly impressed with your wads of cash. Japan is highly sophisticated and not dependent on tourists. You are in a different universe. Customs, day-to-day life, etiquette, everything. Even McDonald’s tastes Japanese.

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu's globe-spanning opus is about more than the breakdown of communication between cultures. Its three interlocked storylines show the breakdown within them - a naked girl on the balcony of a Tokyo skyscraper; a chicken's head being torn off in Mexico; the scream of an American, stitched without anaesthetic in Morocco; frightened children lost in the desert. These are some of the vivid images punctuating his remarkable film. Taking as its metaphor the biblical Tower of Babel, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett head an ensemble cast, looking at three civilisations where the ivory towers of communication crumble needlessly.

Let's start with a couple of lonely goatherds, adolescent lads with hormones a-raging. Dad's left them in charge of the flock and the youngest can't even get a wank in peace. Let's play with the rifle dad bought us to kill jackals. Bet you can't hit that bus! Bet I can!

In Tokyo, a precocious teenager is also trying to get laid. Apart from being too young, she has the disadvantage of being a deaf mute. She lies about her mother's death to try and seduce a policeman.

In San Diego, a Mexican nanny is looking after two children. She is planning to go home for her son's wedding. Her stand-in doesn't arrive and she decides to take the children with her. In an isolated part of Morocco, their parents are travelling on a tour bus when a bullet rips through the window and punctures the mother's shoulder. Her husband wants an ambulance but all he gets is a promise to “hunt down the terrorists.” The rifle had originally been a gift from a Japanese businessman as a thank you for the kindness of his hunting guide.

Babel is a shattering movie experience. It traverses three continents and four languages, looking at the sophisticated levels of communication we build for ourselves that crumble because no one really listens.

Instead of being action driven, Babel lingers in each locale, soaking up the atmosphere, providing a sense of realism that is frequently absent from mainstream films. "We essentially made four different movies, trying to really penetrate four different cultures without using an outsider's point of view,” Iñárritu explains. “The film itself changed in that I had to rewrite each story according to the cultures and circumstances."

He goes on to say, "We talk about the border as a place only, instead of an idea. I believe that the real borders are the ones that exist within us." Babel spares no opportunity to drive the metaphor home by juxtaposing the two. Near the Mexican border, the children ask their nanny, "Why are we hiding if we did nothing wrong?" And she answers, "They think we did something wrong."

Language keeps breaking down and protagonists rely on the physical. In Morocco, a scary-looking old crone offers Blanchett an opium pipe to ease her pain. At the moment her pain is most intense we segue from primitive surgical conditions to the gleaming white of a Tokyo dentist's room. In the chair, the inner pain and frustration young Cheiko feels expresses itself in an unacceptable way. Blanchett's pain is to do with the communication difficulties in her marriage and over her children. The father in Japan is having difficulty communicating with his daughter Cheiko. If there is a common denominator, it's probably more linked to pain than anything else.

There are political pot-shots at the US government's tendency to blame everything on terrorism, as well as its inhumane border policy towards Latin-Americans, especially illegal immigrants who have been living and working in the US for many years. But the main thrust of the movie is non-partisan and not about one country. It is about how we construct complex verbal structures to view the world and, in doing so, miss the wood for the trees.

The complex storylines may be tiring for some audiences as the film winds over two hours. Although the parallel tales and involved time frames don't all become clear until the end, they are much easier to follow than Iñárritu's first two movies, Amores Perros and 21 Grams. It's good to see an actor of the calibre of Brad Pitt taking his career seriously enough to appear as part of an ensemble cast in what is essentially a high quality art house melodrama. But, like Crash the year before, Babel's superior production values and the precise delivery of its unashamedly high aspirations may well strike a chord with today's increasingly sophisticated multiplex audiences.

The descendants of Noah built an edifice to reach heaven, or maybe avoid a second deluge, but they relied far too much on intellect and the false logic of words and paid the price. The story today is seen as little more than a fable to explain the multiplicity of languages in the world. It no longer speaks in our language, whereas the film gets back to the message of the heart.

Fully deserving of the recognition it is achieving, Babel may not be the film you expect, and yet may convince you that art in predominantly English language films is not dead.