Someone is missing from the podium. He had been missing last May in Cannes, when Babel had its world premiere and earned top directing laurels for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. And he was still missing last September in Toronto, when the festival spotlight shone so brightly on the film's most bankable asset, a certain Brad Pitt.
Each time, though, no one seemed to notice his absence. I certainly didn't. That will be our story within this larger story. One is happy, the other is not, but in both there are delicious ironies worth savouring.
First, back to that Toronto hotel in early September, where my podium gaze is decidedly at odds with everyone else in the jam-packed room. While the eyes of all, especially of the braying photographers lined three-deep, are fixated on "Braaad! Braaad!", mine strain through the throng to pick out the equally handsome man sitting so calmly beside the actor. Inarritu, the director, has soared to auteur status on the strength of three linked films: Amores Perros, made in Spanish in his native Mexico with Gael Garcia Bernal; 21 Grams, shot in English in the United States with high-voltage stars Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro; and now Babel, filmed in multiple languages in locales around the world with an international cast headed by "Braaad" and Cate Blanchett.
That's quite a rapid and heady ascent, accomplished -- in contrast to other foreign directors lured to Hollywood -- without the slightest artistic compromise. "I can work with someone but not for someone," Inarritu has said, and his trilogy bears him out. All three films, made in collaboration with his trusty screenwriter and collaborator, Guillermo Arriaga, are complex tales that use an identical structure -- interlocking narratives wedded to a stuttering time frame -- to chart the lethal fallout radiating from a central and fateful accident.
Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (AFP/Getty)
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Babel, for example, opens with a single rifle shot fired in the desert of Morocco, then traces the reverberating echoes from California to Mexico and all the way to Japan. As the biblical title suggests, the connecting theme is language and its communicative failures -- between spouses, between generations, between nations. And, like the other two films, it paints a rather gloomy picture, where free will is repeatedly sacrificed on the altar of an unyielding and bloody determinism.
But Inarritu isn't apologizing: "I like sad things. Musically speaking, it's hard for me to listen to Britney Spears. Generally, I am a guy that has a lot of hope, but I think to arrive at the light you have to go through a very painful or dark process."
If so, he seems bathed in light these days. Chat with Inarritu up close and you can almost feel the energy pulsing off him. Dressed simply in blue jeans and a brown corduroy jacket, his dark hair curling above the collar, he has the looks of a lead actor, but those looks are grounded in the intelligence and fired by the passion of . . . what? A great teacher, perhaps.
Channelling that passion, he talks avidly about the intractable barriers and boundaries in Babel, indeed in all his movies: "The idea for this film was triggered by the fact that I live in self-exile, a Third World citizen now living in a First World country. But it's a very complicated thing. The real borders between us are metaphysical space, within ourselves. And that's always with us -- it's the nature of things."
Yet he also concedes that this timeless condition possesses, in our current climate, a timely significance. "Sure, globalization has occurred throughout history. But we are now in an era of the instant globalization of ideas and goods, even as people themselves grow more insular and tribal. Since 9/11, wherever you travel, it's hard to find anything that hasn't been affected by it, or by the way it's been managed. But maybe travel itself is important. In the U.S., 80 per cent or more of Americans don't even have a passport. You can't begin to understand others, their humanity, unless you look them in the eye, smell their breath."
That "smell their breath" is delivered with real Latin heat, and speaks to a primal, visceral quality in the director and his work alike: "I hate intellectual films. I hate cold art." It shows. Although he's an exceptionally gifted filmmaker -- his frames abound with revealing angles, dazzling edits, fluid glides -- his technical mastery is always at the service of creating an emotionally charged atmosphere. There are sequences in Babel, like one of a frantic Pitt stranded in the Sahara and desperate to find help for his dying wife, or of a deaf Japanese girl brazenly using sex not as a tool but as a weapon of communication, that are searing in their white-hot intensity. Any watcher would get burned, and Inarritu knows it: "Images don't need translation, because they trigger universal human emotions. Film is as close to Esperanto as it gets."
In Pictures:
