Babies (**3/4)

Imagine that you had a baby and let a film crew follow film your child extensively throughout the first 18 months of life, and then edit the resulting footage down to the most adorable and/or comic 20 minutes. Multiplied by four, this is pretty much what director Thomas Balmes has done. Two babies are from wealthy urban centers, Tokyo and San Francisco, and two are from rural areas of poorer countries, Namibia and Mongolia. Two are boys and two are girls, but at this age you don’t notice so much.

The babies interact with parents, animals (pets in the cities, wildlife and domestic animals elsewhere), other babies, and objects. No narrator interjects. No onscreen titles explain anything beyond view of the camera. No subtitles translate the dialogue, but it’s minimal and obviously trivial anyway. Of course, one cannot help but observe the obvious cross-cultural differences and similarities. Western babies spend a lot less time naked. Japanese people apparently sing “Happy Birthday” in English. But, just as obviously, there is no agenda here, no point of view at all, really. Whether this makes the film beautiful, vacuous, or both is debatable.

IMDB link

viewed 4/28/10 at Rtiz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/7/10

Mongol (***)

Here is the epic biopic of Genghis Khan, a man so prodigious as to be the apparent ancestor of millions of current humans, yet presented so purely that he is only seen here sleeping with his beloved wife. As Braveheart is to the Scots, so this myth-like tale is to the Mongolians. However, since the tale ends midway through the life of its hero, rather than giving him a Jesus-like sendoff, the myth is incomplete. Punctuated with period violent episodes, this production from Kazakhstan earned a foreign-language film Oscar nomination, and certainly the production values are there, but it’s the sort of old-fashioned epic where, were it about George Washington, it would mention the episode about chopping down the cherry tree, but not the one where he had deserters shot during the Revolutionary War. Still, not bad, and there’s some impressive shots of the steppes of Central Asia.

IMDB link

viewed 7/9/08 at Ritz East; reviewed 7/10/08