"Bibo No Aozora" in the film, "Babel"

I realized only yesterday that the guy conducting the orchestra in Mariza's concert is Jaques Morelenbaum, who also produced and arranged the music for her album "Transparente." I know of Jaques Morelenbaum mainly because of his collaborations with a favorite film music composer of mine - Ryuichi Sakamoto. One of their most famous works is "Bibo No Aozora," which Gustavo Santaolalla (another wonderful film music composer - "21 Grams," "The Motorcycle Diaries," and "Brokeback Mountain") used in the film "Babel." Sakamoto wrote the piece years ago and recorded it with Jaques Morelenbaum on the cello and Yuichiro Gotoh on second cello.

I don't believe it's often a composer uses someone else's instrumental work in a film for which he scores but I love Santaolalla's selection of "Bibo No Aozora," which plays at the close of the film and leaves you weighted with both sadness and hope. The piano part is especially melodic, and the strings (two cellos in the studio version, a cello and a violin in the live performance) add a haunting counterpoint, and in one particular section is both beautiful and difficult. Its sudden turns make you uneasy, preventing you from relaxing and falling into a lull. Rather, it quickens the pulse with that strange harmony, deliberately jarring the listener and suggesting that every beautiful thing, even a piece of music, is not without complexity. Soon, even the piano's melody becomes equally strange and pointed. And then it ends - as all things must - whereupon you feel bereft of something unspeakably precious even though you remember how it bewildered you too.

Sadness and hope, these are what I heard in "Bibo No Aozora" and what I felt after seeing "Babel." Both are intertwined in the melody and harmony, as they are in the stories in the film. The world has become a global village, and the one the film shows us is harsh, often brutal. Despite the connectedness we're supposed to experience via technology and travel, tragedy, frustration, and anger remain.

Beneath the cover of advancements, we are still a mess, caught in a terribly human disarray of honesty (too little of it) and communication (seldom effective). And the random things that do connect us unexpectedly - like the bullet that demonstrates its alarming consequences in Morocco, Japan, the United States, and Mexico - reveal the terrible divisions among us, the result of politics, economics, class, and culture.

There's an overt but difficult beauty in the butterfly effect that the film explores, that is, the idea that everything in the world is inexplicably linked. In the case of humans, we may be linked but there's often friction whenever we bump up against each other because of our inability to communicate. This recalls the story in Genesis, Chapter XI (which probably explains the film's title as well), in which God grew angry because humans united to build a tower (The Tower of Babel) that might reach heaven, and as a result, he cast them to four corners of the earth and "confounded their language, that they may not understand each other's speech." Language barriers certainly prevent us from communicating easily. But then, two people could speak the same language and still fail to communicate effectively and honestly. Ironically, this inability is something that cuts across most cultures. We're all guilty of it. Too terrified, complacent, or plain unwilling to do so.

Where does hope lie then? Is there nothing else that we recognize as common between ourselves? Perhaps it's the universal emotions and realities that we experience - love, pain, loss, aspirations, dreams, imagination. And one more. The film doesn't address it, but it's well-known: music. Which is why this particular music selection for the ending of the film is so poignant (to me, anyway). "Bibo No Aozora" is composed by a Japanese man, recorded with a Brazilian and a fellow Japanese musician, and then selected by an Argentine composer for a film written and directed by Mexicans.

Bibo No Aozora/04, by Jaques Morelenbaum (cello), Ryuichi Sakamoto (piano), and Yuichiro Gotoh (cello)

Posted by Monoceros at April 30, 2009 1:47 AM