..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Babel
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Paramount Vantage

(***) Babel, the third collaboration of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, partakes of the same structure of overlapping lives and fates as their earlier Amores Perros and 21 Grams, and as such, has taken a substantial shellacking by crickets after its New York and Los Angeles openings last weekend. “We’ve seen this before!” goes the cry. Not, “What do you see this time?”

The concurrent narratives include Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as Americans traveling in Morocco, when apparent “terrorism” erupts; Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Monica del Carmen (an emotional marvel) as relatives who travel to a wedding across the border in Mexico with Pitt and Blanchett’s children and the most imaginative and unsettling portion, the one that seems to most trouble the increasing chorus of detractors of Babel, which involves a Japanese businessman (indispensable everyman Yakusho Koji, from Shall We Dance, Charisma and Memoirs of a Geisha, whose gift of a Remington rifle to a Moroccan tribesman set the fates in motion. His teenage daughter Chieko, played by 25-year-old Rinko Kikuchi, is deaf-mute, obsessed with fantasies of her dead mother, and fixated on losing her virginity. Sign language is one more fashion of communication and miscommunication, along with English, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. Alejandro González Iñárritu does not shy from the oddness of Chieko’s condition and the boldness of her desire, including the attempted seduction of a young policeman.

The director seems to regard the naked female form or face as Surrealist painters have: pale, perfect, a canvas blank for fantastications, like a movie screen, yet unapproachable, unattainable, to be feared, and for all that, pure. Seeing someone who can see but not hear: there is an elemental linguistic and perceptual paradox here, but it is no less fascinating for its directness. González Iñárritu’s substantial gifts as a conductor of image and sound (as opposed to The Big Picture) are at their heights in these portions, and the extended final shot, strangely dazzling, suggests a fragment from a parallel version of Blade Runner if the painters Magritte and Balthus were valued collaborators. It is portentous, pretentious (in the best possible fashion) transfixing, and utterly unforgettable. Dali and Buñuel would smirk approvingly.

- Ray Pride