Of babies and bores

“Everybody loves babies” proclaims the film poster for Thomas Balmés documentary Babies and it seems that the director took that dubious assumption as a precept during filming. The documentary follows four babies from birth to first steps: Ponijao from Namibia, Mari from Tokyo, Bayar from Mongolia and Hattie from San Francisco. But adorable as the children are, they just can’t seem to make the documentary work. Babies are fascinating creatures. . . to their parents and watching babies is as trying as watching your not-very-close friend’s not-very-well-made home videos. Babies captures some sweet moments in the lives of its subjects and will certainly hold meaning for them but for the general viewer it is singularly unenlightening.

The documentary’s observation of these babies’ parallel lives comes without a coherent idea or worldview. The only driving force behind scene after interminable scene of babies eating, babbling, crawling, playing, and pooping seems to be the idea that everybody loves babies and would want to watch them doing the mundane things that babies around them do every day. As the four babies reach important milestones in their first year, the documentary manages to highlight the differences in child-rearing in different cultures. In the age of YouTube, this documentary is certainly redundant and Thomas Balmes has done nothing that National Geographic and anyone with a handycam had not done already. The result is that nary an image from Babies will truly excite.

Because the disjointed piecing together of the footage which resulted in 30 seconds of seeing Mari crawl followed by 20 seconds of Bayar’s carpet was not mind-numbing enough, the director thought foregoing subtitles could only help. So while the adults babble on in their native languages — Japanese, Mongolian, Namibian and English — we have no idea what they’re saying. Most of the time then we not only have no idea of what the babies are doing, but also none at all of what people around them are saying. Another concern, what exactly is Balmes trying to show? The camera rarely moves above the level of the baby — think of how boring a crawling baby’s view is and you’ll forgive them for the ear-shattering crying that the documentary is liberally peppered with. The focus on breasts in the scenes after birth, only seemed to confirm the view that the director wanted to explore how the world looks like to a baby after birth. Pretty soon though, we are looking not at the world from the vantage of the baby, but just at the baby itself with absolutely no reference to what is going on around it.

Everybody does not love babies, and few will find a compelling reason to like Babies.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2010.