With 'Babel,' Director Seeks a Language of Hope

To Tell Far-Flung Tale, González Iñárritu Faced A Towering Set of Obstacles

Alejandro González Iñárritu, left, with Gael García Bernal, who is featured in "Babel." The film is set in four countries, and González Iñárritu cast many non-actors whose languages he did not speak -- and they did not speak his. (By Eniac Martinez -- Paramount Classics)

Alejandro González Iñárritu's third feature film, "Babel," starts off in the foothills of Morocco's Atlas Mountains, on a lonely bluff where two adolescent brothers tend goats. One day, their father gives them a hunting rifle to use against predators. Boys being boys, they can't resist competing to see who can hit the farthest object with the rifle. When a tour bus rounds a bend in the highway far below, the younger boy takes aim at the bus, fires . . . and the shot unleashes a series of repercussions in different countries, among characters who will all, in some way, end up pierced by that bullet.

"Babel," directed by Iñárritu and written by his longtime collaborator Guillermo Arriaga, is the culmination of a trilogy that began in 2000 with the Mexican hit "Amores Perros" and continued in 2003 with the critically acclaimed "21 Grams." But "Babel," shot in three countries over the course of nine months, is arguably Iñárritu's most sweeping and ambitious work so far, and won the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The film opens in Washington Friday.

"Babel" weaves together four stories: the tale of the two boys who fire at the bus; the story of two American tourists on it, Richard and Susan Jones (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett); and the story of Amelia (Adriana Barraza), an illegal immigrant who cares for Richard and Susan's children in California and who needs to get back to Mexico for her son's wedding. All of these characters become linked with a deaf-mute teenager far away in Tokyo named Chieko (newcomer Rinko Kikuchi), who is attempting in increasingly desperate ways to break out of her isolation.

For Iñárritu, what unites such far-flung characters is actually quite simple. "The things that make us happy are very different," the Mexican director says, leaning back on a couch in a quiet moment in Toronto. "But what makes us miserable is the same: the inability to touch and be touched by love. In my film, this inability to communicate happens not just between countries but between husband and wife, father and son."

Rangy and intense, the 43-year-old Iñárritu exudes, like a hummingbird, more energy sitting still than most people do in motion. Over the course of two conversations -- at the Cannes and Toronto film festivals -- he delved into his views on human interaction. "Despite the fact that I've called the film 'Babel,' I don't think our problems are caused by different languages," he says. "I think our problem instead is the inner borders that we build against each other. Lost in our prejudices, our preconceptions, we are not able to listen to each other anymore."

Iñárritu wanted to portray different cultures "without judging or taking sides, but showing how contradictory we all are -- and, at the same time, how close." He now lives in the United States but says that his identity as an expatriate -- for the last six years, he has traveled and worked outside Mexico -- gave him the perspective to shape the film.

As a filmmaker, Iñárritu is known for his kinetic hand-held style, an obsessive attention to detail and a willingness to go the whole emotional length with his actors. From the beginning, he has managed to attract some of the most talented marquee-name actors working today: For "21 Grams," his first film in English, he signed up Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro.

Asked about Iñárritu's appeal, Penn says, "I think probably it's what it must have been like for some actor when the young Bertolucci came on the scene. You very quickly know, with Alejandro, that you're with somebody who not only is a kind of father of his cast and crew but also is really on the cutting edge of where movies are going."

He explains, "Alejandro's got this energetic way of shooting, very close to the actors -- and there's an urgency to so many of the emotions he wants to make movies about, and to the questions he wants to ask."

Though the characters and stories in the three films are all different, both Iñárritu and Arriaga consider "Amores Perros," "21 Grams," and "Babel" to be a trilogy. All three deal with parents and children, and all radiate out from the premise of a central accident and the chance encounters that change people's lives.

It looks as though "Babel," as the last part of the trilogy, will also be their last film together. Recent newspaper articles have quoted unnamed sources about a rift between Iñárritu and Arriaga, and in response, the two collaborators have released a statement: "Our professional relationship has run its course. We have worked together for a number of years on three very successful projects and are incredibly proud of those films. We intend to move forward independently. We have been through a lot together and both wish the other the very best."

Whatever has brought them to this particular pass, both men, when asked separately several weeks ago about their working relationship, talked openly about how they forged three films in the rough-and-tumble of creation.