Event

Babies

"Really, it's a nature documentary, except that the topic is human nature and the subjects are the only humans on the planet whose behavior is unaffected by the camera yes, infants in those precious early months before consciousness becomes self-conscious, before they start crawling into the life-long prison of Me. Of course, as a world of snapshots attests, babies and photography are a heavenly match and here, for 79 fascinating minutes, heaven comes to the big screen. Simple title, simple premise: Follow four newborns, from four very different corners of the Earth, through the first year or so of their existence. Better yet, what is simple in theory proves sublime in practice. Observant and funny and thoughtful too, powered exclusively by vérité footage without a word of narration, Babies is William Blake's Infant Joy brought to rich cinematic life.

The deliverer is French director Thomas Balmès, who has judiciously picked the four locales to play to our modern prejudices a crude thatched hut in a Namibian village, a high-rise apartment amid the neon of Tokyo, an unadorned yurt on the Mongolian steppes, an upper middle-class house in downtown San Francisco. In each place, a child is born, and to those who subscribe to the notion that birthplace is a cruel lottery, the winners seem obvious. The urban babies from the "first world" will enjoy advantages superior nutrition, medical care, education denied to the others. Sadly yet surely, their futures hold a brighter promise. Maybe so, but Balmès's interest is in the unfolding here and now, and the present tells a happier story filled with delightful surprises."