Babies [Blu-ray]

Oh, there is so much to be learned from this film! Thomas Balmes' 'Babies' is a movie to sink our minds into, to conjure our oldest memories and recall the sensations of our earliest experiences and emotions. And all without the enormous distraction of superfluous commentary by any of the Famouser of the Famous And Exceedingly Well Established Celebrities With Voices Which Are Either British Or Deep Or Both. I will also go on record as saying it has the best and most refreshing genetic mix for a cast I've ever seen: Two parts Mongoloid (Bayarjargal of Mongolia and Mari of Japan), one part Marronoid (Ponijao of Namibia) and one part Claroid (Hattie, from the U.S.); Hollywood film-makers, for the love of all that is good and holy, take note of these exquisite proportions!The film moves the way babies experience reality: No scene holds memory or flow from the one which precedes it, nor guesses any portent of its successor. Each scene is happening, then each following scene is happening. Just as each moment, each event, each new object or predicament is the whole of existence for an infant. Now Ponijoa's mother is covering her shaven head in red paint; now Bayarjargal is trying to grab onto those odd things at the ends of his legs; now his older brother of two or three years is accosting him with a small pastry, to his bewilderment and dismay. (This older brother, as we'll see, seems to have rather a tendency towards sadistic trouble-making; P.E.T.A. could go after the little guy if he doesn't mend his ways with cats.) Several such situations we see in the film reminded me of the bloody-mindedness we have in babyhood: 'Yes, I KNOW what I'm doing is making him upset, I KNOW what I'm doing is bad, but I AM going to keep doing it because I HAVE to know what'll happen if I do!' At that age, we have an instinctive need to know how far we can go before the big people interfere with our will.Watching this movie, I have to keep reminding myself that cuteness is an emergent quality, not an absolute one; a thing to be perceived, even if it doesn't strictly exist. We think of babies as silly, adorable, cartoonish, free of reason, and as existing only in relation to those they depend on. When in reality these little people have brains in their heads that are as mercilessly logical as any robot, diligently at work establishing the boundaries, the textures, the possibilities, the behavior, the structure of their environment and all things in it, and the capabilities of these odd forms they control. When a small child retreats fearfully from an advancing duck to cling to its father, it is following strict logic; ducks could very well be the terrors of the earth for all the data the child has on them. When the excellent author and conservationist Douglas Adams visited apes in Africa, he saw two young children in a family dancing wildly on the branch of a tree several feet above the ground. He was sure there was no way they could keep that up for long, and sure enough, they both came tumbling down a moment later, wiser young apes now than they were. One of my very first memories is of the day I learned that if you ran at a glass door, it wouldn't shatter, but if you ran at a glass door HARD, it would. Nor have I forgotten that, even though it seems like sand would be too heavy to be sucked off the ground with a straw, it turns out it's not. We see these four babies learn many things in this film.Ponijao is in the most relaxed environment. She and the people surrounding her spend most of their time lounging in their huts or out on the ground, the women talking casually and easily with each other (I'm reminded that warm climates tend to loosen people up, their personalities relaxing along with their posture and accents, while people usually learn to chat no more than necessary in cold places), shaving their children's heads, painting them, braiding the hair of the older children, surrounded by flies that don't seem to bother them at all. She drinks from a stream just barely above the sand it runs along, in her hut at night she tries valiantly to stay awake for, apparently, the principal of the thing. Yes, her entourage and she are very much at ease, but we don't see her father at all - or any of the men-folk - who are presumably quite busy out providing for them all. For that matter, only very briefly near the beginning do we see a young man who is probably Bayarjargal's father.Roger Ebert, the best film critic, says, 'Two of the babies come from poor parts of the world, and two from rich. They seem equally happy and healthy.' Actually that's not quite right. Again, Ponijao is the most genial, and we almost never see her unhappy. And from the footage we see at least, Bayarjargal is by far the one about whose infancy Heaven lays most, surrounded by his family's cows and other ungulates, free to roam the idyllic and seemingly endless grass-land around his family's yurt, which is reached, of course, by motorcycle or by jeep in this blessed region devoid of roads. (Mongolia, we recall, is officially the Awesomest Country on the Planet. If you'd like to see more of this magnificent life-style, I recommend Sergei Dvortsevoy's excellent deadpan Kazakhstani comedy 'Tulpan', made the same time 'Babies' was.) And the two rural babies are well on their way to being much fitter, healthier and more active than the two city-girls. I also think we see a bit more footage from the two rural areas than we do from Tokyo and San Francisco, and although Tokyo is my favorite place in the universe, I guess it's too bad that the two little citizens don't seem to get into many adventures.We are informed by the consensus at rottentomatoes.com that this film is 'loaded with adorable images, but lacks insight and depth.' I'm at rather a loss to know whether we're to understand from this that people are actually baffled by the behavior of these babies and want it explained to them fully, or whether the people at rottentomatoes.com have a particularly clear idea of what insight and depth would constitute in the case of a film like this. Raw information is beyond insight, wholely apart from depth or shallowness. If we had been told, as Bayarjargal tips over the stroller he's in, that 'Babies have accidents now and then', would the film have been better or worse for it? What words of revelation could possibly be added as we first see the babies stand? Now, Hattie eventually starts using the usual first few English words (especially 'No!'), and I caught Mari beginning to use fragments of Japanese. But if there are any remotely enlightening things to say about this development, they are best kept in lengthy neurological research lectures, not so much in movie theatres. An atrocious critic whom I'll do the immense and undeserved favor of not naming said of 'Babies', 'This isn't a movie. It's a screen[-]saver.' If this film's a screen-saver, then so is the entirety of existence.By now I'm pretty convinced that, in all our lives, we never know joy and contentment as absolute, or terror, misery and sorrow as utter, as we do in our first few years. When we were happy, we had found a thing that we knew would continue making us happy for all eternity, and when we were miserable, we knew the universe had gone horribly wrong and would never, ever be fixed. There's a scene where it dawns on Mari, amid playing with her toys, that they've lost their magic and will never, ever again make her happy, nor will any thing else. She weeps and tosses the useless things away, then commences writhing on the floor in unquenchable despair. She spots a children's book and calms herself briefly, remembering the magic it had before, but as soon as she opens it, she sees the sacred flame has forsaken its pages as well, and throws herself to the floor again, trapped in a world now devoid of any further wonder, and all the universe exists in vain. This is one experience that doesn't quite disappear no matter how old we get. We can have all the things we could ever want, and then still abruptly find our cup quite empty. 'The truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies'.Watching all the shots of the babies nursing their mothers, I'm ever surer of my theory that one of the fundamental reasons we all need some body to love is that we need one whose face and form we can know as intimately as we did our mother's (and our father's, to a lesser degree). One we can embrace and hold as we did our mother, our uttermost home, in whose arms we turned inward from the bewildering outer world and rested, and had all we needed. We knew our mother as a form to hold and take our sustenance from before we knew her as a person. We learned her shape with our arms and hands before we learned it with our eyes. And when we are older and hold one we love, we close our eyes and forget for a moment it is a person we hold, and cling only to that form once again, and speak gently. Again we take refuge from the churning uncertainties that surround us, and have all we need.This film is really as much about these different societies as it is about babies, and our theatres could do with any number of sequels. My suggestions for 'More Babies': Finland, India, Argentina, Egypt.

This is probably The Most Enjoyable Documentary I will ever witness. If you haven't seen this - You are cheating yourself blind! This is WISDOM AS ART. Absolutely magnificent in every respect as a film. I laughed so hard in the San Fransisco segment (which is where I live mind you) that I was in fear of both suffocating & being deported simultaneously. You can learn ALOT from this rare gem. 500 STARS!

excellent but should have translated the languages

One is the daughter of a late-thirties couple in San Francisco. Another is the second son of Mongolian herd farmers. The third, a girl, is the youngest of nine in rural Namibia. Finally there is the first daughter of young Tokyo yuppies. In French director Thomas Balmes' documentary "Babies" we follow Hattie, Bayar, Ponijao and Mari through their first year of life, and despite their vastly different surroundings each baby approaches its new world in much the same way.Although you hear the parents of each baby speaking to them no one talks to the camera, and there is no narration nor are there subtitles. Sequences are loosely grouped together around various developmental or behavior points and how each baby handles them. Ponijao, the Namibian baby, is raised in a communal environment, watched over by the women and children in the village (she is the only baby whose father is never seen in the film). She happily gnaws on things she picks up in the dirt, bites her brother when he won't let her have a plastic water bottle, and gets blissfully dirty crawling around her hut. Bayar, the Mongolian baby and quite possibly the scene stealer of the movie, is an active, vocal baby who quickly figures out how to get his brother into trouble, has a fascination with water, doesn't mind if a rooster walks around on his bed and triumphs when he snags a roll of toilet paper while tied to a bed and gleefully unravels and eats it. Mari, the Japanese baby, brings the viewer into the first world with her baby movement and music classes, but offers a genuinely hilarious moment when at roughly eight months old she throws a screaming, gasping tantrum that is obvious babyspeak for GAAAAH I CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TINKERTOYS WORK!! THIS SUCKS!! Hattie, the American baby, is at once the least interesting and the most truthful. Her earnest parents show her the right books, give her the right toys, take her to baby yoga classes, etc., but there's a scene where she and her dad are in a class and a group of affluent late-thirties white women with their babies are singing some sort of fake tribal song about how the Earth is our mother. Hattie looks disinterested, then gets up and toddles to the door and bangs on it, wanting out. Don't blame you, kid.You don't have to be a parent, an expectant parent or a child to enjoy "Babies." Yes, there are breasts, but they are presented in their useful context. Your kids' eyes won't rot out of their heads if they see them. The germaphobes will have difficulty with a lot of scenes involving Bayar and Ponijao. Ten bucks says those kids are healthier than your slathered-with-sanitizer offspring. But what I loved most about this film was how similar the mothers' interactions are with their babies. All of them sing to them, jiggle them while they're cooing so that they make funny noises, smooch them as they giggle. All of the babies have moments of wide-eyed wonder that only a baby can pull off. All of them poke and prod at tolerant household pets. And all of them have their moment of glory when they are finally able to stand by themselves, the Mount Everest of babyhood. A very entertaining documentary, and many thanks to the late great Roger Ebert for bringing it to our attention.

This is a marvelous film. Without pretension or dialogue 'Babies' documents the first year of life of four babies in four different cultures - Mongolia, Japan, Namibia and California. While you might assume that the differences in the first experiences of each young human will be what's striking, it's actually the similarities that are so engaging, and in the end, life-affirming.As a baby you start out with a basic goal by the end of your first year - to learn how to stand on your own two feet and walk. To get there, you learn to roll over, learn to get on your hands and knees, learn how to crawl, and learn how to stand and then finally you're away. There is no outside program for you, because the agenda is in-built.On the way you are supported by those around you, and you also start to pick up the specific cultural experiences of the place, the people, the family and parents you happen to be with. Language, food, and customs are all unique. When you juxtapose this variable learning space with the innate learning tasks of learning to walk, it just makes everything to do with your culture seem so peripheral and even arbitrary. And absurd - so many moments to do with the individual quirks of your society and customs are hysterically funny!I found myself reflecting, that this journey is something almost all of us have been through. So many first moments are captured on film, that the impression of instinctive self-determination of each baby (that includes you as the viewer) is simply humbling, and deeply moving. By the end of the film, when I saw the Mongolian baby stand up on the open grassy step with distant hills all around, it was absolutely epic.There is much more I can say - the customs of child-rearing in different cultures are fascinating too. I will just add I found the confident patience and trust of the Namibian mother to be simply beautiful.It's a film for parents to be, for children, for those whose children have grown, for grandparents, and for those who have never had children - because ultimately it's a film about us. What it is to be a baby and to grow. Five stars.

I saw this dcoumentary film on Lovefilm and found it a very refreshing perspective into how different cultures bring up their infants. There is no narration or voiceover, it's purely focussed on the babies directly and their immediate surroundings and how they learn about themselves and environment, really lovely, highly recommended. I bought this for xmas for a couiple of friends who are expecting or just had babies.

Lovely,lovely film.Wondrous sequences.Superb BLU-RAY images.Four babies ,around the world,providing many chuckles and laughter.Finding their feet, their reflectios ,their frustrations,their tormentors and being among animals.A disc to keep forever.I daresay it will be viewed as a classic.Very highly recommended.

This is a great movie telling the stories of four very different mom's from four different cultures and places around the globe, Here you follow a child from Japan, Mongolia, Africa and the US. Most amazing are the stories from Mongolia and Africa, where you can see that raising kids and how you do it hasn't changed much in decades :)

I first watched this on a plane flight. I use it loads as I work with pregnant ladies/new mums and dads. I have let them watch it and they all love it. It is entertaining and beautifully shot, it's set to music and really shows the development of the children in a profound way. I would recommend.