From Babel to the grave

ormally when you enter a suite in London’s Soho Hotel, you expect to find the occupant enjoying one of the mini smoked salmon bagels or some such press junket delicacy. So I’m slightly taken aback when, walking into Alejandro González Iñárritu’s room, I find the director in the middle of his yoga exercises.

“I have to do these in my spare minutes,” he says, getting up from a stretch that ought to require a medieval instrument of torture.
We should not be surprised that the Mexican filmmaker isn’t one for indolence or having grapes peeled by the concierge. A tall, impressive looking fellow – even without the elongation demanded by his fitness regime – it’s hard to believe that he’s 42, though conversely, his remarkable body of work reads like the resume of a much older gentleman.
By the time Iñárritu turned 19 in 1984 he had already attained celebrity status on national radio. Between 1998 and 1990, he composed musical scores for six Mexican features, all the while studying film and theatre under Polish auteur Ludwig Margules. During the 1990s, Iñárritu was heading up production at Televisa, Mexico’s most respected television company. His breakthrough as a film director came with 2000’s Amores Perros, a global hit and prizewinner at Cannes written by Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga over three years and 36 drafts.
The pair would go on to collaborate on 21 Grams, a compellingly gloomy study of bereavement and loss starring Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts. The strong meat at the heart of the screenplay would ensure Oscar nominations for all three actors. Babel, which completes Arriaga and Iñárritu’s trilogy, has already claimed the Golden Palm and Best Director awards at Cannes. It looks set to be another major contender at the Academy Awards next March having received more Golden Globe nominations than any other film despite stiff competition from Flags Of Our Fathers, Apocalypto and The Departed.
Given the success Iñárritu and his screenwriter have enjoyed to date, reports of a professional split as Babel premiered quickly became headlines. Mutterings from Cannes suggested that the director had banned Arriaga from attending the festival and that the pair had fallen out when Iñárritu claimed sole credit as the auteur of 21 Grams.
“No,” says the director, waving his hands dismissively. “We are very proud of our work together. It was a tense relationship and after nine years, it had run its course naturally. I have respect and admiration for him and he wants to direct now. It’s sad that newspapers want to make a scandal out of professional differences but that is how the creative process works. When we did not turn up together one paper said that my manager had prevented him from attending. But I have no manager.”
It might reasonably be argued that some of the creative disjunction in the background found its way into Babel, a darker work than either 21 Grams or Amores Perros. Like those films Babel utilises a choral structure and tricks with chronology to form a global portrait of intersecting human miseries. In the Moroccan wilderness, a goat herder sends his young sons (Said Tarchani and Boubker Ait El Caid) out to guard the flock with rifle. The children are told to keep the gun out of sight but things go horribly wrong. At least two worlds away, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), a San Diego nanny and illegal Mexican immigrant receives a phone-call instructing her to stay with her privileged charges (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble) and miss her son’s wedding in Tijuana. Her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) offers to help her out but the situation quickly spirals out of control. Elsewhere, married Americans Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) sit icily in a Moroccan café. They’re supposed to be attempting a reconciliation. Sadly, they fare almost as well as everybody else. The final and most distressing narrative strand plays out in Tokyo as deaf-mute teen Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) masks grief and self-loathing with attacks on her widowed dad (Koji Yakusho) and generally misguided behaviour.
“It was a big logistical challenge,” says Iñárritu. “But beyond that it was cinematically difficult to find the right grammar for these pieces in five languages and four stories across three continents. If it was a novel you could use magic realism to unite such different settings but it is impossible to reproduce that beauty of sense on film where everything is concrete. I used a sort of hyper-realist style, but I was in the editing room before I completely found the film.”
Heavy with thematic preoccupations that touch on neo-Imperialism, exploitation and the impossibility of real communication between people, Babel is unlikely to be remembered as the jolliest picture of 2007. I wonder then why Iñárritu has chosen to dedicate the film to his young children.
“Well, it is not an easy emotional experience but it is for children, my own and the many kids who are suffering. You know 1000 people die on the border between the US and Mexico each year. From the 600,000 who have died in Iraq maybe 100,000 have been kids. That’s reality. That’s how the world is working now. American lives are worth more than an African life. It’s stupid but the mass media help project that idea. If a US soldier dies, they grieve. If 200 people die at a wedding in Iraq, it’s the War on Terror, but if 200 people were killed at a wedding in the US, it would be world war.”
Babel’s scathing attitude toward moral relativism is further underlined by a title that eludes to the ill-fated tower from the Book of Genesis.
“I found the title late in the process,” explains the director. “The film is about collapsing the bridge between husband and wife and countries and systems. When the World Trade Center collapsed I thought of Babel and it seemed to fit. We are building the world with all the same stupidity. But it will continue to collapse until we work toward something more than economic imperatives.”