These days my movie viewing rarely veers into the action zone; it must be all those lame attempts of mine to meditate in the imitation of the Buddha, or even more depressingly that steady increase in oestrogen levels swirling inside me as I age. Anyway, give me a nice Hallmark or Oxygen Channel-type drama of a movie, and you get a contended me rising from the seat with a supressed sniffle or two.

When I borrowed a French movie titled "Banlieue 13" from the library last week, I thought it would be some drama set in the Parisian ghettos that went up in flames and riots last year. Yes, the setting was very much those slums but instead of a nice drama what I got smacked on the face with was a full blooded action movie with an opening sequence that seemed like a French speed-tripped reply to the brilliant chase scene in "Ong Bak", the last action movie I will admit to seeing at the movies.

I later googled for B-13, and discovered that the chap performing in that opening sequence, David Belle, is a master of an urban street sport called "parkour" - a sport that consists of using one's body to elegantly "flow" and "fly" through the built environment. If this sport has a motto, it must be a Zen-like, along the lines of letting the body be one with the building that one is ascending or descending. My bones are too inflexible to do the stuff these guys do with seeming effortlessness but I must admit I am hooked to watching parkour performances such as this, this and this.

Last evening, after slaying a turkey (okay more accurately, only a tiny weeny bit), I went to the movies with friends. Since the group had two Mexicans, we decided to watch[1] the Mexican director González Iñárritu's "Babel". I had liked Iñárritu's "Amores Perros" quite a lot, primarily because his inventive and stylistic use of multiple (and colliding) cinematic narratives, and asynchronous time sequences that he had employed to weave them together. "Babel" delivered with high marks in all these Iñárritu's idiosyncratic departments and more.

"Babel", very much like "Amores Perros", has three interwoven narrative storylines. The main one is anchored geographically in stunningly beautiful Moroccan backcountry, and revolves around a squabbling and strained American couple on a tour bus, and around the lives of a poor Moroccan shepherd family which tragically gets entwined with these representatives of the Terror annihilating (or is it Terror dealing?) Empire. The second storyline revolves around the live in Mexican nursemaid of this American couple who is taking care of their two young children as they travel in Morocco. The third storyline, the one most peripheral to the first two but at the same time, in my understanding, the one central to the movie, is focused on a deaf-mute Japanese teenage girl, traumatized in the aftermath of her mother's suicide, and her yearnings to be like any other contemporary Japanese teenager with her laughable loves.

While the suture that Iñárritu uses to sew together the three storylines - a Winchester rifle, formerly owned by the Japanese girl's father, and used in an accidental shooting of the American wife by one of the Moroccan shepherd kids - can be a bit of a mental stretch, and is perhaps not strong enough to bind all the three storylines together, what made me like this movie a lot was the mute Japanese girl’s narrative. Why? Because this by virtue of its silence became an eloquent counterpoint to all the talk, and the inability to be comprehend or be comprehended because of the rifts between people (I include myself in the people) that arise more simply because of different languages, and at a more subtle level, because of differences in aspirations, in desires, in prejudices, and in world views.

Rinko Kikuchi's deaf-mute Japanese teenager was the most eloquent of all the personae in this Babel, with her hunting silences in that urban desert of noise Tokyo, and with her very mobile language of her eyes. Her lovely acting coupled with Gustavo Santaolalla's (heard previously in "The Motorcycle Dairies" and "Brokeback Mountain") excellent world music infused background score are bound to stay in the viewer's mind much after this nearly two and a half hour long "Babel" falls silent.

Highly recommended.

[1] Since we got to the movies more than an hour early, we ended up watching an hour of the latest James Bond - almost ten minutes into the Casino Royale card game - sitting smack damn in front of the screen. It was perhaps the degree to which my head was angled at the curved screen, with the non-stop explosions rattling the fluids in my skull that made me not like the latest Bond, Daniel Craig, as much as the previous one - too beefy for the homoerotic critic in me. That said Eva Green was a delish dish to behold, and the action was gripping.