Babel: Movie Review

I truly don't know where to start about this movie. Have you ever felt confused and dazed after watching a movie? but you truly know that you understood it.

That's what I felt after watching Babel, as I try to understand about the title of the movie, it reminded me of the story in the Bible about the Tower of Babel where people wanted to reach the heaven by building a high structure, then God punished them by ending up in different places with a lot of differences, like language and culture, then I realized that, that was the movie was trying to portray, showing the differences of humanity through language barrier and the culture of the people.

The movie was shot in four different places, one is Tokyo, where there is a mute girl whose father is being followed by the police about her mother's death, another one was in Morroco where a couple was having their vacation then turned out to be their worst nightmare, the other two were in United States and Mexico, where a nanny attended a wedding ceremony of her son and had a problem on the way back to the United States.

What dazed me is the shifting of scenes, as I tried to understand the movie, I felt confused, I was really having a hard time connecting the dots, somehow at the back of my mind I was catching my breath, I was carried away by the scenes, especially the cinematography of the movie, I'm amazed on how they naturally showed the struggles of the couple in Morroco, it made me feel their hardships looking for a doctor, calling the embassy, and such struggling scenes. I can't help but admire the people behind it's cinematography.

It made me realized that the language barrier made it harder for the couple to ask for help, same thing with the mute Japanese girl, language has always been her problem, people laughs at her, and she's so frustrated that nobody of the opposite gender likes her because of her incapability to speak, the same as the children that the Mexican nanny is taking care of, they're also having a hard time playing with other children because they simply don't understand each other.

Though it was shown in the movie that we are separated by our differences, one thing that I noticed is that, we are still the same, maybe not in language and culture, but in general we are the same, we all have challenges and struggles in life, it happens to all of us, it happens to each one of us.

And most the important thing that I noticed in this film is that, whatever differences we may have, we still all have the same thing, the most important unit of the community, our family, it was strongly portrayed in the movie the value of family, the importance of family, by doing everything for your wife, reaching out to your daughter, and doing whatever it takes just to be in your son's wedding.

Family will always be the common denominator of humanity, whatever differences we may have, family speaks no alien language, speaks no different culture, love will always be love wherever you will go.