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Amores Perros (“Love’s a
Bitch”), the film from Mexico directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (the
best known star is Emilio Echeverria), appeared once in the festival at the
Lagoon (a larger “art” theater in Minneapolis in the Landmark chain), and
this gritty, 153-minute opus from AltaVista films (and Lions Gate Pictures)
has provided a minor sensation, re-echoing the 1996 Miramax Pulp
Fiction, with a tri-furcated and recursive plot about a miscreant
teenager, vulnerable model and guerilla fighter whose lives intersect over a
horrible Mexico City car wreck and involvement with dogs. The up-close
brutality (of the dog fighting and living conditions and of, say, the model’s
horrific injuries leading to amputation as in Boxing Helena) is
hard to take indeed. But the ironies of the stories are wonderful, like
the poor little pooch who falls down the hole to be eaten by rats.
This
directing/writing team came back in 2003 with 21 Grams, another partitioned parable
centered around a car wreck, this time a hit-run by a born-again Jack (played
by Benicio De; Toro), a fatality that leads to a heart transplant
for Paul Rivers (a battered Sean Penn). This time the film is in English, and
replaces Mexico City with Memphis, not comporting well with rural scenes in
New Mexico. The squalor is graphic, as are the jail scenes, the messy
housekeeping, the on camera vomiting (twice, as Rivers rejects his heart) and
even the pre-surgery chest shaving, making Penn look as smooth as a baby,
maybe not proving much. The “21 Grams” refers to the weight lost by the body
to the Rosicrucian soul at transition.
Babel,
(2006, Paramount Vantage (Paramount Classics), same director, R, 142 min,
USA/Mexico/Japan, in several languages including Moroccan, Spanish, Japanese,
English). This is the third film of the trilogy and certainly the grandest
and most ambitious, and "political."
"Do not go
near the Tower of Ned." That was a commandment to me in a boyhood dream,
probably in an extraterrestrial scenario. Probably the Tower (or for that
matter, "The Two Towers" in the Rings trilogy, or the Two WTC
Towers), is more like the Tower of Babel (probably in today's Iraq, in the
Shiite area). In Sunday school we learn that God was displeased with Man's
demand for command of his own world by building the Tower, and burdened them
with the cacophony of different languages. Inerrancy would make us believe
that literally. Of course, geography gives obvious explanations. Why are
Spanish and French somewhat different? The Pyrenees.
Like this
director's other films, it is a Film in Three Parts, three interlocking
stories, here in Morocco, the California/Mexico border, and Tokyo. The
genesis of the story is the accidental shooting of an American tourist Susan
(Cate Blanchett) on a bus by a boy taking target practice in the desert
mountains Her husband (a grizzled and crackle-faced 42-year-old Brad Pitt)
fights with the other bus passengers and locals to protect her. The police
find out about the incident quickly, but for a long time cannot get
assistance to her, while they gun down several village boys. In Japan, the
man who gave the boy's father the hunting rifle is sought through the
nymphomaniac deaf-mute daughter, whose behavior, even in a dentist's chair,
is silly and graphic. Tokyo never looked spiffier, most of all in the disco
dirty-dancing scene. The American couple's kids are home in San Diego, and
their illegal alien nanny decides to take them to Mexico for a wedding, with
uncle Gael Garcia Barnal driving. The connections will develop,
sometimes over TV jumbotrons in Tokyo.
The film
certainly has meaning, about a "small world," where happenstance
brings us together (even more so with Google) but where cultural differences
keep us apart, and where a small act can be magnified into global events in
unpredictable ways. Such is the nature of speech itself.
The film looked
slightly wider than the usual 1.85:1, and had the sharpness, detail and depth
that we associate with Paramount's VistaVision process of the 50s.
Colors are always natural, which in the Moroccan desert can turn almost into
black and white.
Steven Soderbergh's Traffic makes
a good comparison.
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