In his earlier film Amores Perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu had provided us a sense of the way in which individual lives collide at the crossroads of life. That belief is still present in his new film Babel. Lives can, and do, in a split second, hurtle towards disaster. But by now you know that you don’t have to wait for that particular split-second. Lives are always, like cars or bullets, speeding towards death. And what Iñárritu shows us in this film, his most ambitious one, is that accidents don’t just happen at traffic lights or even only at the border. Accidental living is taking place, with ever accelerating sense of doom, across the giant expanse of our unequally shared globe. In that sense, Babel is a dramatic film about our moment of globalization.

Babel starts with a man arriving at a mountain home in Morocco with a gun to sell. That gun links lives and destinies–at the moment the fatal shot is fired–in Morocco, America, Mexico, and Japan. (How come the film-makers missed out on China and India?) I want to add that because of the way in which it shows us how children can become terrorists and also how good, loving people can become illegals and even murderers, Babel is a film that could have been made only by an artist living on the other side of the border divding the powerful from the powerless.

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