Movie Review: Babies

Is there anything more universal across time, space, and culture, than a mother holding her newborn child? Babies are the same whether born in a hut in Medieval France or a modern hospital and, I suspect, their mother’s reactions don’t vary much either. An eagerly anticipated documentary, “Babies,” opens this Mother’s Day weekend and explores the similarities and differences in a child’s first year of life across the globe.

Ponijao, a boy, is born to a tribal family living in a stick hut in Namibia, Africa. Mari, a girl, enters the world under the bright lights of Tokyo, Japan. Bayar, a boy, comes home to a Mongolian yurt, and baby girl Hattie joins her family in their San Francisco home.

With no narration and no explanation of what you’re seeing, or even interpretation of the language the parents speak, the film feels a bit disorienting at first. However, once the viewer settles into the baby-centered pace, the lack of voiceover focuses attention on the children. Now Bayar is goggling at a chicken walking on his bed. Half a world away, Hattie, with a similar expression, ogles a rattle her father waves at her.

This film is not about poverty or presenting one culture as better than another. All of the children (only Bayar has an older sibling) and mothers are well-fed and healthy. Indeed, they all seem happy and remarkably well-adjusted. The audience can hear the laughing, loving, and lyrical sounds that the mothers make, even if we can’t understand the words. The young ones are lucky to be born into each family.

Which is not to say the children’s lives are the same. The rural and traditional cultures, Namibia and Mongolia, allow a level of freedom to their babies that feels extremely uncomfortable to Western mores. Bayar crawls through Mongolian steppes, somehow surviving the feet of cattle that surround him. Ponijao happily sucks on bones he’s dug out of the dirt. The director contrasts this with a shot of Hattie’s father vacuuming all around her in their already clean home. After a while, Tokyo and San Francisco seem a bit neurotic, as parents pay for music classes and play groups while Bayar gleefully plays with goats and Ponijao joins in the songs his mother and cousins sing.

The film takes a fairly soft approach. Surely, during the course of a year, one of the babies must have taken ill or been injured. Nothing of that sort appears in the movie. One knows that a baby’s odds in Africa are much worse than in developed countries -- perhaps chewing on bones in the dirt does have consequences after all? -- although Namibia is a relatively stable and healthy region.

The film is not concerned with such political or sociological issues. Instead, it focuses on the babies. Despite such disparity of experience, the four develop at roughly the same pace. They focus on objects, whether that object is an expensive toy or a passing dog. They grab whatever happens to be near. They smile at their mothers and fathers, laugh, say mama, throw tantrums, and gleefully crawl. As they near the one-year mark, they make their first tentative steps, some under the hovering gaze of parents and some with little notice.

You’ll want to be prepared for maternal nudity, showing the tenderness and beauty of breastfeeding in all its glory. Apparently there’s no Gap in Namibia because the women walk around with just a loincloth and some beads. Three of the children’s births are not shown, but Bayar’s birth is recorded in an over the mother’s shoulder shot showing her knees under some blankets. It’s rated PG for cultural and maternal nudity throughout.

Ultimately, the things that divide us seem trivial in the light of a baby’s smile. Each new little life adds a miracle to the world.  That’s something on which we can all agree.