BABEL/CATE BLANCHETT..A girl and a gun

[KiwiCoromandel]

All you need for a movie, according to French cinema's great '60s revolutionary Jean-Luc Godard, is a girl and a gun. It seems a cheap sort of aphorism, at least on first hearing; we've all seen a few kiss-kiss-bang-bang thrillers but that's hardly the sum total of cinema. Then along comes a film such as Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's Babel, with its global sweep of interlocking stories about the rippling effects of a single act of random violence, and Godard's apparently flip remark reveals itself as a powerful metaphor. The girl and the gun: what are they, after all, but symbols for the opposing forces of Eros and Thanatos, life and death?

To say that these are all a movie needs is to say that movies are about everything we know - which, indeed, is Inarritu's ball-park subject.

The girl is Cate Blanchett, playing an overwrought American mother on a clearly dismal Moroccan holiday with her husband, played by Brad Pitt. The gun is wielded by a young boy herding goats with his brother; his father has bought it from a neighbour to help them defend the flock against jackals but young Ahmed has something to prove to his elder brother and not enough years on his shoulders to connect the dots between aiming, firing and killing. Yes, the gun can hit a target three kilometres away. See that tourist bus? He can hit it.

In a single moment, that gun wrecks several hitherto unrelated lives.

Blanchett's Susan lies bleeding to death on the dirt floor of a villager's house as Pitt's Richard tries desperately to persuade the US embassy that rescuing her is more important than dealing with the terrorists they suppose shot her. Back in the US their Mexican nanny is stranded with their two children on the day of her son's wedding in her home village. Unable to find anyone sufficiently reliable to look after them, she makes the disastrous decision to take them across the border to the wedding.

Even the original owner of the gun, a Japanese businessman who once went hunting in Morocco, is touched by Ahmed's moment of bravado. The police who come to question him are unaware that his own wife shot herself not long before and that his daughter, a deaf-mute, is acting out a desperate, silent despair that is brought to a head by their visit.

Inarritu works in Los Angeles now but he comes from Mexico. He is, according to Blanchett, "very, very life and death". His previous films were Amores Perros, a trio of stories of life in Mexico City's darkest corners, and 21 Grams, another web of stories set in the aftermath of a fatal car accident that links the driver and the bereaved, even though they do not know each other, in a circle of despair.

In Babel the Mexican director swings between languages - Arabic, Japanese, English and his own Spanish - to show a world in which the central tragedy is overlaid by the inability of those affected even to communicate. Only the gun - death - speaks clearly to everyone.

Critics, many of whom have grown increasingly irritated by what they see as Inarritu's morbid turn of mind and whirlwind approach to storytelling, have labelled his films "a trilogy of death". It is not difficult to interpret them this way. Death looms large in Mexican culture: both Aztec pyramids and the local Catholic churches are full of images of gory dismemberment and hearts cut from the body, while the Day of the Dead, when those strange little images of cavorting skeletons are out on show, is a perennial curiosity for visitors.

But Inarritu is infuriated by the death tag; his films, he insists, are about life. "I am optimistic about people; I want to leave the audience with a feeling of hope for the future."

If there is a common theme, he says, it is the connection between parents and children, within the American context in 21 Grams and on an international scale in Babel. The crucial point in Babel is that Ahmed acts in utter innocence; his father, not understanding this, knows only that he must protect his children.

When Susan is shot, Richard immediately forgets all their mutual resentment and hostility; before anything, they are the parents of two children. "I have two kids," Inarritu says. "When you have kids, that is when you understand how vulnerable and fragile you really are. That is what all the characters in the film share."

What they do not share is language. The film's name is a biblical reference to the story of the Tower of Babel, built so tall it was supposed to reach heaven. God, angered by his people's pride, struck down the tower and cast the people within it across the Earth, condemning them to live apart and speak different languages. "But I think language is not the big thing," Inarritu says. "It's those prejudices, branding things that we have been getting since we were kids, so we know Mexicans are dangerous and lazy and smell bad; we know Muslims are dangerous fanatics; we know Americans are the hamburger guys."

It was his own experience of moving between countries that was his first inspiration. "I guess I had that in the back of my mind, coming here with my family from a Third World country, which leads to a lot of anxiety and misunderstanding. It's not a bad thing. It's about the fact that you are in a different place with different standards. We think differently."

He will, he says, never see his surroundings in the same way as an American would. "And I think that is happening around the world. That is the way we live now."

Making a film across language barriers did pose its own problems. Most of the Moroccan performers were not actors. "We were facing the subject matter on the set," he says. "At times there were seven languages being spoken. Even the actors and non-actors were speaking different tongues. Brad and Cate were my back-up, you know. It was hard for them because I was orchestrating madness all the time."

But their remoteness had its own advantages. The villagers in the Atlas Mountains were not intimidated or particularly fascinated by the Hollywood stars in their midst because they had no idea who they were.

And although it was difficult to accrue their performances - "sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't, you have to do it bit by bit" - the boys, in particular, have enormous impact on screen because they are, as Inarritu puts it, naked. "They are pure. They don't have any tricks. And that is a gift."

Remarkably, those Hollywood stars do not distract us on screen, either. Inarritu had the money lined up for Babel before Pitt came on board. He didn't need a star. "It wasn't an obvious choice," he says, "but I thought it would be a challenge to have someone as recognisable as that. And to have an icon like him, with so much magnetism and attraction - you can feel empathy immediately for this guy. He has that power to get people in touch, so I thought he was a good choice beyond any economical thing."

Blanchett, he says, is simply "one of the best actors in the world. Her instincts are impeccable but she is also very intelligent. I've always been a fan. There is something going on in Australia I love."

In 21 Grams he chose Naomi Watts to play the highly strung role of the mother whose children were killed by a careless driver. "There is an intelligence to Australian actresses that is very different from most other countries," he says.

Blanchett spends most of her time lying down, clearly in agony. "The more Alejandro talked about Babel, the more I saw the challenge of it," she said recently. "The challenge was having very little text and very little time but needing to convey the entire weight of a relationship in one scene, quickly setting up a dilemma with enormous weight and gravitas. The thing Alejandro and I spoke about was the quality of listening." At the most basic level, she said, she spent much of her time on set thinking of different ways to groan.

Curiously, Babel is both the culmination and the end of a particularly productive bond of communication between Inarritu and the Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote all three films in the trilogy and with whom he developed their splintered approach to storytelling. After nine years, the collaborators have clashed over the question of authorship of their films. When the film was invited to the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year Inarritu supposedly banned Arriaga from attending. The fact that he won the prize as best director must have rubbed salt into the wound.

Of course, Inarritu has made the right noises about their respective need to develop in new directions. For his part, he plans to take a year off and spend time with his children. "There is a piece of my liver in every film. I think I get five years older with each film I make," he says, with considerable feeling. But he doesn't make films to make anyone more comfortable, least of all himself. They are matters of life and death.

"Art should create catharsis," he says. "If it doesn't move people, art has failed."

source:AP/Paul Byrnes

image:AP:CATE BLANCHETT in BABEL.