Babel (15) ****

2:02pm Sunday 14th January 2007

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Two Moroccan shepherd boys on a dusty hillside; a defiant deaf-mute teenager in Tokyo; a Mexican wedding and an American couple trying to overcome the death of their baby.

In Babel, which closed the London Film Festival on Thursday, four seemingly independent worlds collide when the two boys with a new rifle take a careless potshot at a tourist bus.

It is only the third full-length feature by the talented Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. As in his films 21 Grams and Amores Perros, with which it forms a trilogy, Inarritu explores how random acts can have far greater consequences than one could ever have foreseen.

This time, he is concerned with the difficulty of human communication. Babel takes its name from the Biblical account of how God scattered people over all the earth by scrambling their single language into many. But although the film is shot in at least five languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and sign) and on three continents, culture is far from the biggest barrier.

It is the walls we erect in our hearts - the prejudices and assumptions - that prevent us from seeing the truth, even when it is staring us in the face. The American couple Richard (a pleasantly greying Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) is on holiday in Morocco in an attempt to reconnect. But when Susan is hit by the shepherd boy's bullet, it is branded an act of terrorism and quickly spins into an international incident.

Back in America, the Mexican nanny Amelia is refused leave to attend her son's wedding across the border. It seems heartless - until one discovers that her boss is Richard, shattered by his wife's accident.

Desperate, Amelia decides to take the couple's two children, Mike (Nathan Gamble) and Debbie (Dakota Fanning's younger sister Elle), with her. All goes well, until a border guard gets suspicious of their driver - her hot-headed nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal of The Motorcycle Diaries fame).

In one of the most gut-wrenching moments, a guard ignores Amelia's Spanish pleas for the children to be rescued after they got lost while fleeing into the desert. Instead, she is cuffed and told in cold English that she will be deported.

It takes somewhat longer for it to become clear how the fourth plot line is tied into the story. In Tokyo, the siren-faced teenager Chieko can neither hear nor speak. On top of that, she grapples with the suicide of her mother and her desperate need to be seen and known by a man. Her father does his best to reach out, but it is in a strange policeman's arms where she finally finds unexpected comfort.

Rodrigo Prieto's exquisite cinematography gives each tale its own distinct feel. In a superb scene half way through the film, the soundtrack switches between silence and pulsating music as Chieko enters a nightclub of throbbing bodies - dipping you in and out of her eerily quiet world. On the other side of the globe, the Mexican wedding is all kitch and colourful bliss.

Across the board, the cast deliver gritty performances that delve beyond the surface of each character. But it is the newcomers who truly shine: Boubker Ait El Caid as a headstrong little goat herder Yussef; Adriana Barraza as the tender Mexican nanny; and warm and tender nanny Amelia; and Rinko Kikuchi as the deaf-mute Chieko.

Despite the cacophony of voices, Babel speaks a universal language. Its message is powerful: If you want to be understood, listen. Listen beyond the defences and pretences of life. Listen with your heart, to the hearts of others.

• Babel was screened at the London Film Festival and went on general release on 19 January 2006.