In this picture you can see a wedding after it has taken place. It’s shortly after the dawn. In the centre a black dog is strawling around. You know this kind of chair (international style), at least one of them has fallen down. The small flags, lined up on strings, still flutter in the wind. One senses things will not turn out well. I took this photo from Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Babel. At this part of the movie you can experience how the film cuts are composed around the music, sometimes going parallel with the changes in it, and sometimes go against the music’s rhythm so the pictures seem to breathe. Iñárritu initially wanted to be a rock star, he worked as a DJ for five years, enjoyed playing music and talking all day long about his feelings. He said, he did his therapy in public. After he was bored he went in advertising; one of his jobs was a new Ford campaign, which he directed at the Mexico City airport. Advertising kept him humble, he said. You don’t consider yourself so very important. Like his earlier films amores perros and 21 grams Iñárritu tells the three stories in Babel sequentially and there’s a centrifugal force that spins out into the characters‘ lives. When one watches the movie the first time one focusses on bringing the plot threads together. The stories are set in different geographic regions (the border between Mexico and the USA, the desert in Morocco, Tokyo), the characters are depicted from different generations and different social backgrounds. Now, that I saw the film several times, I recognize the simularities and parallelisms: the role of the family father (mothers are weak or absent), the behaviour among siblings, in each story a person gets lost or is lost already, there are different kinds of handling drugs and how the authorities of a country behave towards the citizens and vice versa. For some moments, in a dentist’s waiting room and in a dance club you can’t hear a sound and there’s a reason for it, no failure of the loudspeakers. I like weak characters that through a painful process can really learn a lot of things about life and about love, said Iñárritu, and at the end, with dignity, they are better. In one of the last scenes of Babel a policeman is having dinner in a shushi bar, takes a handwritten letter out of his coat pocket and reads it. The content of this letter is not just an easy guess. There’s a scope for interpretation.
