LITTLE ROCK — Elegantly conceived and expertly executed, Thomas Balmes’ Babies is a charming French documentary that follows four newborns from around the world - Nambia, Mongolia, Tokyo and San Francisco - through their first year of life. There’s no narration, no subtitles and very little verbiage at all. Just babies.
Smiling babies. Laughing babies. Cooing babies. Babies being poked in the face by their (slightly) bigger brothers. Babies nursing. Babies sleeping. Babies pulling on the faces of dogs. Babies being babies.
It’s a lot of babies. And if you like babies, you’ll like Babies. And if you don’t like babies, then you’ll probably like the mules or the goats or the incredibly patient dogs and cats with whom the babies interact.
That said, 15 minutes of Babies would probably suffice for a lot of us. Or we might be fine with 30 or 45 minutes of Babies. As for myself, I kind of like the 30-second E-Trade baby ads, “Shankapotamus” and “Lindsay the Milkaholic.”
But then there are other people who probably would want to keep Babies running on a loop. That’s fine.
Babies is basically a highlight reel, and the heroes are the editor who cut it into a kind of narrative tone poem that ultimately works as a mildly chiding critique of helicopter mothers and parents who worship at the cult of the sacred baby. In Africa, little Ponijao crawls around free range, drinking from creeks and mixing with goats. He puts rocks and bones in his mouth, and he’s the only baby of the bunch without a cat to torture. (Instead, the film implies, he has his friends the flies.)
Meanwhile, on the steppes of Mongolia, Bayar’s experience is similarly rough and tumble, as the camera catches his brother swatting him with a piece of fabric. At one point, a beautifully imperial rooster enters the yurt, and leaps up on the bed that holds the swaddled Bayar. The chicken inspects the kid, and eventually moves on.
Less exotically, Tokyo-born Mari is born into a world of toys, and San Francisco’s Hattie has a couple of well-heeled hippies for parents. The film’s funniest moment comes at their expense - as Hattie bolts from her bearded father as he sings “The Earth Is Our Mother” at some sort of crunch granola parent-child experience. One suspects it won’t be the last time her parents mortify her.
MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 05/07/2010