The choice to use Japan in the globe-trotting Babel is more than blind chance, but a calculated way to imagine -- and profit from -- difference.
Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2006 effort, Babel, is the third film in the director's planned trilogy about the experience of death. Written in conjunction longtime collaborator, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, the two are going beyond the formula developed by their successful pairing which led to the dynamite 21 Grams and Amores Perros. Like Iñárritu's other works, Babel offers some intriguing insights into the ephemeral nature of human existence; however, what's new is that some of the most thought-provoking parts of the work stem from the director's naturally inclusive approach to global space.
Composed of loosely interconnecting stories occurring simultaneously across the globe, from Southern California to Mexico to North Africa to Japan, each story and region holds its own beautifully from a narrative perspective. Focalizing the film's North African segment, Moroccan vacationers Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) embody global-phobic Americans faced with an ever-shrinking, ever-scarier world. While the stories in North Africa, Mexico, and Southern California all revolve around the same conspicuously gringo family, one section of the film fits together less smoothly than the others. Deaf-mute high school student Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), and her father, Yasujiro (Japanese notable, Kôji Yakusho), recovering from the grief of the death of Chieko's mother, connect to the film only tenuously.
Structurally, the imbalanced relationship between the different geographic spaces of the film can be jarring. The international economics of filmmaking suggest one possible rationale for Iñárritu's expansive global imaginary. With Japan's box office dollars holding first place as the largest in Asia, casting two Japanese actors, one of whom (Kôji Yakusho) has led a widely heralded career in Japanese cinema for nearly thirty years, created stellar international market development opportunity for the film. As films rely on foreign sales to recuperate a larger and larger percentage of overall production costs, the Japanese component of the film provides greater access to an important revenue stream.
However, the conspicuous globalism in Babel works in intriguing ways beyond crude financial calculus. Theoretically, the relative distance of Japan from the rest of the story suggests the symbolic geography of a certain genre of global imaginary. Mexico and the Arab world, particularly in the questions of illegal immigration and terrorism alluded to within the film, represent consistently challenging and problematic parts of the domestic life of Americans. Within Babel, East Asia functions as a culturally distant figure, significant in its economic contribution, yet as irascible and inaccessible as the Yasujiro's character, who holds up an international crisis investigation by not returning his phone messages. Adding a further layer of cultural inaccessibility, the main character in the Japanese part of Babel is deaf-mute suggesting a pernicious and near-insurmountable linguistic and cultural barrier between Asia and the rest of the spaces in the film.
In fairness to the director's vision, the Tokyo narrative's loose connection to the rest of the narrative is more than compensated for by the astounding honesty exuding from main character Chieko's story, played with pouts and tears by Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi. Kikuchi embodies the horny, virginal, and depressed state of being a lonely high school girl with such drop-dead precision that her performance inspired low-level nausea and embarrassed glances around the movie theater. Chieko's various foiled attempts at seduction, simultaneously comical, excruciating and sweet, offer some of the most memorable moments of the film. While it may be tempting to criticize Iñárritu for capitalizing off of the obvious appeal of shooting a repressed Japanese schoolgirl shedding her clothes, the depth and pathos oozing from Chieko more than justifies the creative decision. Indeed, the visceral strength of Kikuchi's performance nearly tears the loosely woven web of narrative asunder by radically shifting the narrative's geographic balance of power.
On one hand, Babel, like the Biblical parable for which the film was named, is just one big unruly mess of languages and cultures. However, another alternative may be that a gut negative reaction to Babel's unapologetic globalism may just be the inner voice of the Richards and Susans of the world. Or, more specifically, as filmmakers are now creating stories in an increasingly interconnected world, is it ever relevant to write without taking into account their international reverberations, however seemingly minor? Rather than a mere aesthetic gesture, or an unmappable geographic confusion, an increase in filmmaking like Babel appears more and more like a common sense response to the global context within which all contemporary stories actually operate.
Official Babel website: http://www.paramountvantage.com/babel/ (http: //www.paramountvantage.com/babel/)