Babel

Starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho, Rinko Kakuchi. Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

When you bat an eyelid in Bangkok, a tower block could crumble in, say, Khartoum. Your smallest action in Bang Rak might trigger, among other bad things, a massacre in Eastern Europe or a drought in Patagonia. Your carelessness could provoke a tragedy of the saddest kind, ruining families and civilisation, because everything is dependent on everything else, because that's the unbendable law of God, of the stock market, of the relativity theory, of ambitious filmmakers. And no, I'm not talking about global warming.

Mexican Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won best director award at Cannes 2006 for his grandiose film Babel, and his presence will surely give Oscar punters a run for their money if they've already pinned their hopes on either Grandpa Clint or Uncle Marty winning the statuette. That's because Babel is dressed up and gift-wrapped to win awards; it's a film that spells the word IMPORTANT on its every gene, with its God-like point of view and stories that mean to dig up the core, a rotten core to boot, of all humanity.

Inarritu is a formidably talented filmmaker whose previous two features, the gorgeously grimy Amores Perros and the wrenching 21 Grams, employed the disorientating jigsaw effect by compartmentalising several strands of narratives, breaking them up into short vignettes that slowly assemble into one whole shiny piece. The streetwise bravado of Amores Perros sucks us in and makes it work, while 21 Grams projects a heartfelt aftertaste because the drama has its impact. Inarritu clearly subscribes to the idea of cinema as a vessel of raw emotions, as testified by his chilling 11-minute short in the compilation 11''09'01 marking the Sept 11 tragedy.

Now with Babel, the director's colossal talent still stands out, sometimes overshadowing his characters. His preferred technique of chopping up his narratives into fragmented blocks this time seems like a self-indulgent conceit, his globe-spanning multi-stories more like a calculated dealing than a spiritual conviction on human interdependency. Inarritu shuffles a deck of cards and spreads each one on the table, then he deftly gathers the pieces up and re-arranges them in a neat order. You admire the procedure, though it doesn't really make you care.

The grand design of Babel, which takes place in Morocco, Tokyo, LA and a Mexican border town and involves four families in those locations, is spun from a dastardly rifle. Sons of a Moroccan sheep herder play with their father's newly acquired weapon. Their aimless shot hits an American tourist, played by Cate Blanchett, who's travelling with her estranged husband, played by Brad Pitt. This accident triggers a chain of events that leads us down, down, and further down the chasm of irredeemable tragedy. Unable to come home, Pitt asks his Mexican maid to take care of his young children, and the maid, along with her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal), decides to bring the white kids along on their trip to a wedding party across the border in Mexico _ a seemingly harmless action that becomes an unwise decision.

Then the tale jumps to Tokyo. Here we discover the identity of the rifle's original owner, a stern-faced businessman and part-time hunter who nurses a sullen relationship with his disenchanted daughter (Rinko Kakuchi). Flashing her panties in public to mark her existence in the world, this girl is perhaps the only character that inspires genuine sympathy in the entire film.

Babel is meant, of course, as a dramatised essay on miscommunication, presented in crisp, breathtaking cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto. It has its power, but it is not a poem, since it leaves nothing to the imagination. Its philosophy on intricate and invisible human interconnection is more or less an endorsement of the notion of predetermined destiny, and with my limited knowledge I simply wonder if we should watch a movie, any movie, to learn that we're born with the ability to control our own lives despite the situation, or a movie should tell us that our courses are pre-determined by the actions of some strangers somewhere far away.

Charting the courses of the characters' lives is no doubt a job of screenwriters and directors. Catholic or Calvinist or Buddhist, they're all playing God, and playing God is part of the game. But to some directors, playing God also means acknowledging God -- to humble oneself before a greater force, an all-encompassing cosmic energy whose entirety cinema can only try to replicate, without success. Directors like Bergman, Bresson or Ozu always evoked the presence of God, sometimes questioning him, sometimes bowing before him, but always reminding us that something is always beyond our grasp. The films of those directors are poems, because they let us ponder bigger questions. Babel only gives us answers, which is satisfying though its impact barely lasts.

It is unholy of me, but I'm reminded of another movie I've recently seen that's pertinent to this God issue. Little seen elsewhere aside from its country of origin Heremias, Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess is a mesmerising religious allegory made by independent Filipino director Lav Diaz. The nine-hour monochrome movie concerns the lonely journey of a poor peasant who's tested by hostile nature, corrupt government officials, devils in the guise of men, and maybe by his god. The image of the peasant dragging his cow through muddy puddles and his futile attempt to do what his conscience tells him is the right thing to do represents a spiritual poetry on the ongoing trial of humanity.

Heremias is a film that believes both in the power of cinema and in God. Babel is a beautiful picture that believes only in itself.

Volver

Starring Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, Directed by Pedro Almodovar, In Spanish with Thai and English subtitles at Lido

Pedro Almodovar's latest movie is a comical, affectionate joyride of feminine optimism. Volver is at once fantastic television trash and a revelation of warm-hearted humanism, displayed through the ripe primary colours of Penelope Cruz's wardrobe and lipsticks and the mythic milieu of rural Spain. There're nods to Hitchcock and a knifed body stuffed in a fridge, there's a dark secret waiting to be disclosed, and there are moments when the surreal intrudes on the mundane, but all technical and structural discussion is moot and superfluous when the movie sends us out full, sad, and happy.

Funny if anyone would perceive the film as an "arthouse" movie (probably with a sneer), given that it was premiered in Cannes last year, and considering that it's a baby girl from a homosexual European filmmaker glorified by critics and cinephiles of all orientations. If anything, nearly all of Almodovar's films - from his madcap early opuses like Law of Desire and Kika to tender fares like All About My Mother, Talk To Her and apparently Volver - have proved how art - sincere, honest art firmly rooted in local sensibilities - can blur and break up the distinctions between what we believe to be high, middle, and low-brow works. And if there's any "brow" worth reviewing in Volver, they are the rich, arrow-like, cupid-carved eyebrows of the director's goddess: Cruz.

It seems like the vividness of the entire film has its source in the sparkling lava of Cruz's beauty: But remember, this is an actress, when acting in Spanish, whose talent is much more exciting than her cleavage. Cruz plays Raimunda, a woman from the rougher part of town, a mother who endures all sorts of female troubles, including her vile new husband who lusts after her teenage daughter Paula (Cobo). But even as she swears and sweats, as she draws blood from the man who wrongs her and drags his heavy, lifeless body around - in Almodovar's world, males are often a burden - Cruz manages to remain a slim gazelle who skips about with such grace. It's well-known that Almodovar reveres classic Hollywood beauties, the likes of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, but Cruz is the director's supreme Sultana of present-day La Mancha, the sleepy rural domain in which a large part of Volver is set.

When the film opens, Raimunda and several other women are scrubbing the stone graves in a cemetary; for these hard-working females, duties include tending to the dead as well as the living. Soon afterwards we're introduced to different generations of women who make up the chromosomes of Spanish femininity, each of them played by Almodovar's favourite muses. Raimunda has a sister, Sole (Lola Duenas) who's now living in Madrid after leaving their hometown of La Mancha. Their mother, Irene, (Carmen Maura) died in a fire many years back, though her sister Paula (Chus Lampreave) becomes convinced that Irene's ghost has come back to visit her in the house. Paula is sick, and she's being cared for by Augustina (Blanca Portillo), whose own mother also disappeared years before.

Volver means "coming back" in Spanish, and the motif is manifest in the return of Irene, Raimunda's supposedly dead mother, into the realm of the living. For Almodovar, motherly love hardly ceases even when a mother no longer lives with her daughters. Irene's resuscitation - her homecoming - is treated matter-of-factly by the director and his actresses, and the delicate fibre of the narrative doesn't suffer any rupture from this bizarre plot point. If this were the riotous beginning of his career, Almodovar might have seized the opportunity to spin the absurd threads of biting comedy by having the dead lecture the living. But what we're seeing here, despite what looks like the ghost of Irene, is a tragi-comedy of struggling human beings who constantly discover a new meaning of the word "family".

Almodovar has waded into this water more than once before, but it's still bracing to witness him shifting the tones of the story so fluidly, as his chirpy flock of tough, determined birds whirl in and out like great gusts of wind. An absurd douche into the suspense takes place when Raimunda devises a plan to get rid off her major "female trouble" (how this sequence resembles the ordeal of a character in the Thai film 6ixtynin9!), then we emerge into a sequence of colourful conviviality when Raimunda takes over a neighbourhood restaurant, throws a party for a film crew shooting nearby, and surprises us by breaking into a gentle musical interlude. What a mother - a woman - can do, or has to do, in an Almodovar movie covers a startling range from the darkest of crimes to the silliest of activities. The kick is when we realise that these women do everything they do because their generous hearts tell them so.

Recently, someone threw me a pseudo-cryptic question: Can we classify a movie by its gender? Can we say a movie is male or female, in the same sense that we distinguish a man from a woman?

As far as I know, a film cannot grow a sexual organ, so this is a purely rhetorical question. Usually, any form of demographic classification is the work of marketers - this is a "chick flick", this is a "tough-guy picture", this is a "teen comedy". Stereotype is useful in selling products, movies included. But sometimes when a film is made with as much heart as with hands, it could rise beyond such simplification and divisive segmentation. And of course it could transcend the gender frontier. Brokeback Mountain is a love story, not just a gay love story. Volver may dispense with men and celebrate the beauty, the spirit and the follies of women, but that's exactly why men should be able to appreciate it as much as their girlfriends will.