Friday

I'm not sure whether it was my attitude to Babel, or Babel's attitude to me, but I couldn't connect with this movie. I suppose 'hollow' is the word that best describes my experience. I couldn't engage with the characters and the situations they found themselves in. It felt like an empty exercise, rather than a film. But because it has received a lot of praise, I tried to stay open-minded. One of the basic elements of story making, however, is to get your audience to empathise with the choices your characters make, no matter how foreign. I didn't empathise. More than this, I found myself disliking some of the people we were obviously meant to sympathise with. The characters felt too obvious and stereotyped, the situations too simple. The long parts where music played over silent action only further distanced and bored me, where they were meant to engage our emotions more. The parts where we were given the perspective of what it was to be deaf seemed too simplistic. I'm fairly sure that's not what's it's like to be deaf. But of course we'll never, I hope, know. Nonetheless, perhaps any reaction is good; it shows the filmmaker has created something that you engaged with, rather than ignored. I don't know. I have a feeling this was just a bad film. Anyway, Gael Garcia Bernal was great, as always; it's just a pity he didn't have a larger part.

(I saw this at the Odeon Tottenham Court Road.)