Babies

(2010)

Directed by

Thomas Balmes

Review by Zach Saltz

Posted - 7/11/10

Thomas Balmes’ Babies cannot quite solidify itself in the murky ambiguous distance between serious ethnographic documentary and sentimental Hallmark greeting card.  The result is ultimately what the viewer chooses to take away from it – whether scenes of baby Hattie running away from singing Native American chants in her San Francisco music class should be read as Western over-parenting leading to spoiled, attention-deficit laden, constantly stimulated children, or whether it’s just “cute.”

Of course, no documentary that devotes itself entirely to capturing images of babies sleeping, eating, trying to walk, cooing, crying, and learning to say “mama” can take that much of a serious beef with claims that it is sentimental.  But Balmes does seem to be saying something beneath that poop-and-vomit-stained surface: Despite the claims by child psychologists, the shrewd early education moguls behind Baby Einstein, the talking babies on the E-Trade commercials, and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Away We Go, babies nowadays are still pretty much happy and content, regardless of the socio-economic circumstances of the worlds they are brought into.

But perhaps I’m being too glib and “adult.”  Babies examines the first year in life of four infants from across the globe – two from poor, rural regions (Ponijao, from Namibia, and Bayarjargal, from Mongolia), and two from wealthy, urban areas (Mari, from Tokyo, and Hattie, from San Francisco).  Ponijao and Bayar spend a considerably greater amount of time on their own than do their first-world counterparts.  Ponijao drinks water from a pond like a dog.  Bayar gets beat up by his big brother.  No Ritalin is prescribed (on camera, at least) and the only baby that gets seriously injured over the course of the film is Hattie, when her father foolishly pushes her tricycle into a sandbox at the park (there’s no denying American dads are stupider than non-American dads).  As products of generations of western overprotective parenting, we may recoil at the sight of newborn Bayar being taken home from the hospital on a dirt bike through the grassland carrying his entire family.  Or the notion of baby Ponijao reaching for the genitalia of her friends, or breastfeeding from someone other than her mother.  But relax.  Believe it or not, just because an infant doesn’t have a mass-manufactured Iron Man or Barbie doll with which to play does not necessarily sentence it to an unhappy life ahead.

Not that Balmes’ point here is that direct or simple.  If there is a point to Babies, it’s that all newborns are pretty remarkable in their natural desire to learn and advance.  Present-day America is a society where the goal is to make as much profit possible from doing as little actual work as possible.  Infancy perhaps represents the last time in our lives when the craving to grow and intake new experiences is not coerced out of us through external motivators (good grades, personal profit, physical appearance).  In the world of babies, the competition is for mommy’s milk, not a promotion, and it’s OK to cry.  And disappointment or failure isn’t met with salary cuts, demotions, or accusations of fraud, but with “awws” and collective “how cute!”s.

Therefore, perhaps it is ironic that all these thoughts came to me while watching a movie that required no real active thought at all while watching it.  But lo, am I not a mere product of an over-medicated, over-caffeinated, over-stimulated western childhood?  Nonetheless, I’d still choose my Tickle-Me-Elmo over a wooden stick any day.

The “performances” of the babies are all uniformly spectacular.  Baby Mari, in particular, has a natural flair for the dramatic, especially when she throws a diva-sized rant when she cannot operate her toy.  Dan Kois of the Village Voice in his review of the film hails Baby Bayar as a Mongolian Ben Stiller.  Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s true that he does provide most of the Babies’ comic relief (at least when we’re not laughing at the cluelessness of Hattie’s Mother Earth parents).  He certainly is cute for a little Focker.

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