Over the weekend I finally watched the film Babies, directed by Thomas Balmes. My friend Amy M., who knows way more about babies than I do and is actually having one in a few days (at home!), sent me the trailer a year ago with great excitement, and I finally found the time to watch the documentary — instantly no less — on Netflix. (I also watched Hot Tub Time Machine, but that is neither here nor there.)
Babies follows the birth and roughly first-year development of four little ones in vastly differing cultures: San Francisco, Mongolia, Tokyo and Namibia. There’s no dialogue, but the way the footage is edited together is artful and compelling.
Some of my favorite scenes included:
- The scene in which the Mongolian baby is sitting on the bed petting the cat (and by “petting” I mean grabbing and violently stroking), and the cat doesn’t flee; it just takes it. The cat might even be enjoying it. I can only hope our two kitties are as accepting of a grab-happy baby one day.
- The scene in which the San Francisco baby is with her parents at some kind of hippie baby class. The adults are chanting, “The earth is our mother,” and the baby stands up and makes a waddling beeline for the door, like, “Get me out of here!”
- The suggestive scene in which the Japanese baby is trying to fit a wooden toy stick into a hole in a round disc. She grows so frustrated at her inability to line up the stick and the hole that she flings her body onto the floor and cries.
Overall, the scenes of the Western family, with their mountain of gear, passive parenting style and baby-yoga classes, left me cold. And I was extremely encouraged by the scenes of the Mongolian and African babies — crawling in the dirt amid the livestock, being washed by spit and breast milk, and being entertained by millstones and tin cans. Not that I intend to do any of that stuff with our future children, but I found it reassuring that people raise kids just fine in humble circumstances; they can figure out how to care for an infant even without running water, diapers and high chairs. It made me feel like, if these women can successfully wrangle their newborns in these rustic environments, I’ll do just fine with a bit of help from modern invention.
No comments:
Post a Comment