/> Starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Rinku Kikuchi
Written by Guillermo Arriaga
Directed by Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu
Rating: ****

It's providential, if not outright miraculous, that at the end of the year we've been blessed with a film that takes the cinematic experience way beyond the realm of the linear or even the cogent.

Babel is babble of languages, cultures, voices, attitudes and expressions all bonded outwardly by nothing more than an elemental desire to be heard beyond the fascinating fusions of politics culture religion and bigotry that forms the framework for all contemporary inter-personal relationships.

Departing from last year's remarkable episodic drama Crash, Babel doesn't attempt to bring the various stories together in a clasp of comforting culmination.

Babel just lets the babble be. And therein lies its beauty. It's a spiral of gripping activity in cultures that are sweatily urgent. In Morroco two adolescent boys fool around with a gun precipitating an international diplomatuic scandal when a stray bullet hits an American tourist, who happens to be Cate Blanchett playing Brad Pitt's isolated wife...

Cut to Tokyo where a deaf and mute girl (Rinku Kikuchi) is famished for sexual gratification. Her encounters with Japanese men of various sizes would be funny, even erotic, were it not so hauntingly poignant.

Director Arriaga doesn't offer us the joy of seeing his characters arrive at any comfort zone. Till the end they remain vitally unmoored, not even seeking to find answers to their geo-political disorientation.

There's an immense ruggedness in the storytelling. Take this: two little American children and their nanny join a Mexican wedding celebration. The energy just flows out of the screen...And you wonder where the disturbing yet heady mix of revelry and crisis is leading....or is it not leading anywhere?

Hurling through the disparate cultures of Babel in one sweep of ambivalent cinema, you are left looking at people and cultures that define themselves through their uncertainties.

Not a single actor, not even matinee idol Brad Pitt, looks like an actor. Not one location is fudged. Not a moment in this lengthily laid-out pastiche of curious resonances rings untrue. This is a document of the human heart as seen through eyes that never blink.

Is Babel the best international film to be released in India in 2006? Possibly....Director Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu has made an enormously self-indulgent film that miraculously escapes the consequences of its stylized storytelling.

Once you get a hang of the logistics of the stirring echoes that reverbrate across the mammoth canvas, you don't care for anything except the characters' restless lives.

In that sense, this is cinema its most basic level.