For exclusive footage of a San Francisco tot consuming a banana, “Babies” is the film to see.
Eschewing narration and interviews, the doc lumps together assorted scenes of four infants from birth to their first cowboy-legged steps. The kids — a girl in Namibia, a boy in Mongolia, a girl in Tokyo and another girl in San Francisco — wail, flail, feed and emit. I’m not interested in any of these processes as performed by a child other than my own, and even then I’m not crazy about some of them.
The cry of a baby is ruthlessly, evolutionarily designed to be one of the most irritating sounds on Earth. So why would you want to hear it (many times) on massive movie theater speakers? What’s the next project for Team “Babies” — “Car Alarms of Many Cultures”?
MORE ON THE MOVIES BLOG: BOX OFFICE PREDICTIONS
The French-made film, which by the way contains as many images of bare breasts as “Showgirls” (don’t fret, it’s only “cultural and maternal nudity”– does “cultural” mean “doesn’t count because it’s black Africans”?) is a near-total write-off in its San Francisco and Tokyo scenes. If you want to see how the rich world looks after its young, with the wee stuffed into strollers and hurtled toward the next Mommy and Me class, you need only thrust your head out the window.
The Mongolian baby is a little more interesting — wandering goats and roosters are his Dora and Elmo — but the true star is the Namibian girl, who grows up in a hut of sticks. She’s fascinating because her world is so different, yet “Babies” makes no effort to explain anything about her. Why do Namibian babies wear belts and necklaces (and nothing else)? What is her mother telling her? (There aren’t any subtitles.)
As the Namibian mother scrapes her baby’s bare scalp with a dirty knife (Haircut? Superstition? Preventive medicine? No clue is given) and the infant crawls in the dirt picking at bones, though, the movie’s jaunty, aren’t-babies-neat score can’t hide how cramped and woeful her life seems certain to be.
And one of the film’s cute parallel sequences, when we see the babies interact with favorite pets (San Francisco, Tokyo and Mongolia: fluffy kitties; Namibia: buzzing flies), seems like a cruel joke at the African child’s expense.
A whole film designed around this poor soul, complete with a deep investigation of what she’s up against, might have been a marvel. But the rest of the movie is largely just cuteness — and if cuteness is all you’ve got, you aren’t going to hold people’s attention for 80 minutes. (Ask Jessica Simpson, whose movie career didn’t last that long.)
It is true that fatherhood changes a fella (once, you will be surprised to learn, I cultivated a certain caustic edge; these days I can’t take a dozen steps on the sidewalk without helplessly lobbing a few unsolicited grins into tiny bundly-wundlies nestled deep in passing prams). But even I realize that other people’s babies are boring. So is “Babies.”