Misericordia

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga have collaborated on three movies, although one may argue that they’ve been making the same movie over and over again. Their first film, Amores Perros, was about a group of seemingly random individuals in a Mexican city who literally collide with each other in a car crash. Their second film, 21 Grams, was about three seemingly random individuals brought together by another vehicular accident. Their third, the much-praised Babel, is about several seemingly random individuals across the globe who are linked by a bullet fired at a moving tour bus.

Of course, these random strangers all turn out to be connected. They unwittingly cause each other pain through misunderstanding or sheer bad luck. One theme, rendered with progressively bigger budgets and stars, more locations, and escalating levels of misery. Terrible things happen to these people. In Amores Perros the audience gets an occasional reprieve – visual humor, a light moment – but in 21 Grams the suffering is so unrelenting, you begin to suspect that the movie was produced by manufacturers of antidepressants. In Babel the level of agony is so extreme that it leaves the audience feeling tranquilized. At the screening I went to, a senior citizen in the back of the cinema gleefully cried, "Mamamatay silang lahat!" (They’re all going to die!)

True, Iñarritu gets amazing performances out of his actors, but what exactly do we get out of their pain? The realization that life is torment? Or do they suffer in order to win awards?

In their movies Iñarritu and Arriaga have tossed out conventional linear storytelling, preferring a jigsaw puzzle, figure-it-out-yourself approach. It seemed clever in Amores Perros – So that’s what happened to the killer dog! – but watching 21 Grams, one suspects that the approach lends artificial complexity to a story which, told from beginning to end, would be a traditional soap opera. In Babel, figuring out the connection between the four stories becomes more important than the characters themselves. The filmmakers withhold the information almost until they’ve run out of movie; we are promised some earth-shaking revelation, and when it is finally unveiled – That’s it? These characters are connected all right – because the filmmakers say so.

Reports have it that Iñarritu and Arriaga have argued and will no longer work together. This may be just what Iñarritu needs, because why should such a talented director keep repeating himself? Yes, Babel may win the Academy Award for Best Picture – confirmation that a filmmaker has made himself safe, familiar and non-threatening enough to please Oscar voters.

Babel consists of four stories taking place in different parts of the world. A goatherd in Morocco buys a rifle and gives it to his two young sons. An American woman on vacation in Morocco with her husband gets shot. A Mexican nanny in San Diego takes the two small children left in her care to a wedding in Mexico. A deaf Japanese girl in Tokyo tries to lose her virginity. The link between the first three is fairly obvious; the last bit is kept a mystery to tantalize the audience in case the weeping and wailing doesn’t hold their attention.

The movie is supposed to be about how people are connected across the globe, but I came away with three impressions: Don’t go to Morocco. Don’t go to Mexico. Watch out for those nasty Japanese schoolgirls. Babel makes a plug for global understanding and appreciation of our shared humanity by pointing out that people aren’t necessarily evil, they’re just stupid.

Much of the trouble in Babel could’ve been averted if people had cell phones. Now movies are supposed to exist in their own universe, but they still have to be plausible. It’s the year 2006, there’s a busload of American and European tourists in Morocco, and not one of them has a cell phone. The driver and tour guide have no radio, no means of communicating with anyone. All right, maybe they can’t get a signal. But an affluent couple from San Diego, California goes on vacation, leaving their two small children with the nanny, without bringing any sort of mobile communications device? Or maybe Americans just aren’t as technology-savvy as Filipinos. I am reminded of a movie from four or five years ago in which CIA agent Ben Affleck has to warn the President of the United States of an impending nuclear strike. He calls his boss’ cell phone, but the boss is at a football match and can’t hear him above the noise. In a Makati movie theater, the same thought flashed in everyone’s mind: Send him a text message, stupid.