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a cultural review of babel, 20 July 2007

Author: saeideh hajinejd (s.hajinejad@gmail.com) from Islamic Republic of Iran

To write a film review we need 5 steps, The first step of understanding a movie as an audience is "credit", so I determine some credits of this movie.

Credit

Movie name: Babel Cast: Brad Pit, Cate Blachett, Gael Garsia Bernel,Kikuchi Rinko,Koji Yakusho,Adriana Barraza,Said Tarchani,Boubaker Ait Caid

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Screenplay: Rodrigo Prieto

Genre: dramatic, exciting Location: 3continents (Japan, Mexico and Marrakech)

Plot

The story of Babel is given from the gospel, that's about the people who want to build a high tower to reach to the paradise of God but God becomes angry from their behavior and gives them different languages for not understanding each other, another name of this story of gospel(bible) is tumult. This film is about four different cultures that they will be related to each other during the story. This movie shot in 3 different continents from Asia to Africa. The language of the people in the movie is completely different and they have different methods of behavior and facing with problems although they even have a common pain that starts from one point. This movie pays attention to a nice concept that is about the difficulties of understanding and realizing the base concepts which are too difficult. The movie starts when a man in Marrakech walking in an open area and carries a thing, he gives it to a man who lived there. It was a gun and his sons tried to learn how to use it, someday when they were shooting throw the mountains they saw the tourist's bus and tried to shoot at it and it caused a bad injured to an American woman. From the other side we see a deaf and mute lady who has lots of problems with her situation and tried to ignore it. Her mother committed suicide when she was younger and she faced with that position, she had the lack of kindness and her father wasn't at home any time. She had some friends but couldn't believe her problem and suffered from that.

In the other side we see the life of a baby sitter who takes care of the son and daughter of that Americans. The story doesn't follow a certain point but in this way we see lots of different things about their cultures and their behaviors but their life relates to each other with the destiny of that weapon. And we face with four different cultures from Arab, American, and Mexican to Japanese culture, their languages are different but they relate to each other by Medias and technologies.

Vocabulary

This step is about the words and the pronunciation and some thing that we have learned from the movie but there isn't any necessity to use this part, so I prefer to focus on other steps.

Characters

The first character Rinkuo kikuchi (Chieku)

Another step belongs to characters that I should describe about some elements of them. It starts from appearance till their psychologies and personality, age, nationality and physical descriptions, but I should determine both of them, one of them is nationality and mother tongue and the second is physical description. One of the most important characters of this movie is chie ku (Rinkuo kikuchi), she's a Japanese cute girl, but she's deaf. We are seeing her every where for attracting men, but some people ignore her and some of them make fun of her…so she decided to behave in another way…. At last the movie says to us that her solution isn't sex or other sexual relations her problem is because of attention and kindness. In addition these elements aren't just for this girl in this position, so every one needs them for being alive. The second character Adriana Barraza( Amelia)

Another character to speak is the Mexican baby sitter (Amelia) who is so dependent to the American children and is a responsible person in her job. Her happy life changed to a sad life during hours and her laughing face changed to a crying face. Her crying for separation from those children and the United States is the nicest cultural relations secants of this movie.

Conclusion One of the professional adjective of this movie is related to the narration structure that's not like other movies and this stream isn't a circle that you follow that like a story perhaps the stories of people in this movie relate to each other with a sudden pause that you don't expect that. When I saw this movie for the first time I thought it's like other Hollywood movies that wants to compare American culture with other cultures and shows their culture and says we are better than the others, but after another watching I understood the goal of this director is something else and there isn't any superiority between them and the others, and they have the share sections. The biggest cultural distance is between those American couple that we think they should understand themselves easier but we see they don't have any nearness to each other and maybe a Muslim who had a different religion could understand him better. The other thing that attracts me to this movie was not focusing on religions and not showing some exact behavior for that but we could see the indirectly elements of religious rules in the clothing ,the men and women relations and the style of cities and even in behaviors. Although the movie ends with "happy ending" we feel the pressures of human beings difficulties in the life and these problems don't know any boundaries and cultures perhaps they are happening if we want them or not.

Saeideh Hajinejad, a B.A student of communication and media studies at university of Tehran.

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