This movie, as it says at the end of it, is based on a true fact. The film is about a daughter whose mother is crazy (apparently this is how people was labelled in 1988. I suppose today they would say schizophrenic or whatever) and doesn't recognize her. The little girl lives with the sister of her mother, who doesn't love her. At school all the kids and girls laugh at her... the only three people who love her disappear from her life for different reasons. Eventually (Warning: spoiler) she also becomes "crazy", they say because she has inherited the insanity from her mother, but the audience is told by the movie that it is due to the lack of love. The story is interesting and it becomes more and more interesting as the movie goes on. But the movie is so horribly made, with lots and lots of errors and unrealistic dialogue and behaviour, that absolutely nobody would do today a film this way.
2 Reviews
Let's pretend Babel doesn't exist.
joelsegarra3 July 2006
This educative type of movie exposes a tricky subject: the impact on a child of her mother's mental illness. The plot focuses on two aspects: the defensive mechanisms used by an unloved girl -Babel- to have a glimpse of sanity and the 'see no evil, hear no evil' attitude of adults including relatives, school teachers and psychiatrists. Their failed attempts to tackle tragedy give us an idea of how naive is society at times. The mother is mad, the daughter is not, period.
Technically the movie is unimpressive, the same goes for the acting, but nonetheless it is effective enough to interest the viewer. But sadly, the 'based upon a true story' effectiveness is somewhat lost when the director sets the action in Barcelona, a Barcelona no one in Catalonia would recognize as real because the lack of Spanish speaking voices through-out the movie. Back then in 1987, Barcelona was still mostly labeled in 'Spanish', shopping malls and institutions were reluctant to give a chance to Catalan speakers. Even today Catalan is used in one out of 6 TV channels and on one out of 100 movie theaters so is unthinkable a monolingual scenario as seen in that movie. Thankfully, this anomaly has been overgrown with time and local movies and even foreign ones like "L'Auberge Espagnole" reflect a more likely scenario of our bilingual society matching more appropriately the Babel in the movie's tittle.
Technically the movie is unimpressive, the same goes for the acting, but nonetheless it is effective enough to interest the viewer. But sadly, the 'based upon a true story' effectiveness is somewhat lost when the director sets the action in Barcelona, a Barcelona no one in Catalonia would recognize as real because the lack of Spanish speaking voices through-out the movie. Back then in 1987, Barcelona was still mostly labeled in 'Spanish', shopping malls and institutions were reluctant to give a chance to Catalan speakers. Even today Catalan is used in one out of 6 TV channels and on one out of 100 movie theaters so is unthinkable a monolingual scenario as seen in that movie. Thankfully, this anomaly has been overgrown with time and local movies and even foreign ones like "L'Auberge Espagnole" reflect a more likely scenario of our bilingual society matching more appropriately the Babel in the movie's tittle.
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