Babel, a disappointment (spoilers inside)

In December, a friend call me, and tell me about Babel, pointing that the moroccan part happens in Tazarine.

I'm a little bit surprised, I did nothing about it, a moving shooting with Brad Pitt, I should have heard of it.

I don't have time before leaving, I don't have time in Morocco, and I finally went to the movie on Sunday.

I went out with a mixed feeling, which, as you can imagine if I say so, is not fully positive.
Morocco, catastrophs are also piling up.

Two young goat keepers are shooting with a hunting riffle. This gun was sold to their father to kill the jackals, by another Moroccan who received it as a gift from a Japanese hunter.

What an effort to be able to introduce in this story the third part of the world, this Japanese and his deaf daughter walled in her silence amidst the defeaning sounds of Tokyo by night. You can appreciate the strength and meaning of the symbols, in case you did not get it, some parts of the disco scene suddenly cut the sound, to put the final point on the ideogramme !

However, except for falcon hunt (an awesome experience), I ignored that Morocco was a top level hunting resort. Last lion of the Atlas was killed in 1922, and jackals, hyenna and panthers are more than seldom and threatened of local extinction.

So, our two Moroccan kids go to the mountains with their goats, and I'm still waiting that we arrive in Tazzarine (or Tazarine as they write in the movie), because we are more in the M'Goun, or Saro or off-road in the area of M'semrir and Tamtatouchte.

And here comes the sikmeth (another arabic word in english) our two kids argue about the gun, the oldest shoots really badly, and says that the gun is wrong, the youngest shoots correctly and wants to prove his brother the gun is good, he aims the bus and shoots, nothing happens, yes it does, the bullet is somewhere near the throat of the beautiful blond Cate who was sleeping at the window.

Worse than the accident in the Tichka pass this winter !

Sorry, I can't buy it, for many reasons.

The gun is expensive. The father pays it around 500 dirhams, for poor families without regular wages like the one shown, it is a huge amount (a manual worker receives around 50 dirhams for a 10-12 hours day work), this gun is precious, and I can't believe it is trusted like that to the kids, without warning and training. Specially as the father sees that the oldest shoots really bad. And we are here in a tribe of

Berber living in the mountains, these ones who rebelled the longest, being pacified around 1935. War, feuds and what means a weapon and his dangers are still something the people know by experience. And these children are young, yes, but they live in a world where you have to kill and prepare your own meat, and not buy it under plastic in a supermarket.

They know better than our children what life and death means, and I can't believe they would act like the stupid youngs of our suburbs....

But you have to make a movie, haven't you ?

After that comes the worst.

Our bus is of course schocked anpeople ask what to do. Ouarzazate is too far away, 4 hours drive, no hospital nearby, the bus driver offers the shelter of his home in Tazzarine, the bus makes a U-turn and heads to Tazzarine (wo we were more in the area of Alnif, and our goat keepers in the Saro).

So we reach Tazarine, at some point of time a sign says to turn left (eh ? Tazarine is on the main road). We see the entrance of Tazzarine, this I know, with the way leaving on the left to our doyar, and on the right the teleboutique (small shop where you can phone), often closed, at the foot of the hill with the old fortified tower on the top.

Tazarine and its palm grove

That's all we'll see of Tazzarine in the movie.

Instead of heading ahead to reach the center (where you have the tank station, the hotel, the caidat, and a little bit further away the big hotel with its swimming pool, that you reach in five minutes), the bus crosses a village of small house with flat roofs hanging on the slopes of the mountain, on a small road without tarmac, just like a berber village in the mountains. We see passing by women dressed... not like the women of Tazzarine, but like Berber of the mountains (do you feel I'm repeating myself a bit ?) or heavily veiled like Arabic women.

A woman veiled with the Arabic way in Marrakech

In the South, the clothes are still very traditionnal, and specially for women. When you really know the country, you can recognize their village (and hence their tribe) the way they dress. Women of the Draa valley have large skirts, a headdress of bounty colors and a large black cotton shawl embroidered with gaudy wool. When you see a woman plainly veiled from the top of the head to her shoes in a long heavy black veil without decoration, you can be sure she belongs to the few Arabic population, not the the Berber.

Woman of the Draa valley (in Agdz)

So we're in Tazzarine, there is no tarmac because someone decided to remove it, and just for the occasion, many women from different villages of the area decided to have a walk in the village. Come on !

Finally, the bus takes on the right (where you have actually a mountain in Tazzarine) and climbs.

Tazarine is a village in the Draa valley. Old houses are in the ksours, a kind of fortified village with very narrow streets, often covered, where such a bus would never ever pass. The houses in the ksour are over several levels, and they are not separated one from the other, like shown in the movie. And the very few houses built on the highs are modern ones, made of concrete.

Finally the poor woman is laid in a house, on a ground just covered with a small rug. It's hot, the sky is cloudy, the other tourists believe in an attentat, are scared and want to leave. Brad Pitt try to convince them to stay, the bus could be of any use (I still wonder which one), and he finally runs to the only telephone in the village, to try to get in touch with his sister, in the States, and have her manage everything, "call the embassy, they can find us, we're in Tazarine, take care of the kids..."

Even,... even if there was not an impressive quantity of teleboutiques (phone cabins) in Tazzarine...
Even... if the story happens before ADSL and Skype...
Do you really believe a Moroccan bus driver, in charge of a full Pullman bus, and without a cellular phone ?
Do you really believe in a Moroccan village without a cellular phone ?

I don't. And if you believe it, you've never been to Morocco.

The story becomes more and more irrealistic, the so-called sole ambulance (actually, we have two ambulances in Tazzarine, and two nearby) does not arrive, without us knowing why, and the scared tourists leave in the bus while Brad Pitt is making his phone call. Here also, I can't believe it. It's totally unamerican.

For the ambulance, we'll learned at the end of the movie that the embassy did not want to use the it, because it was Moroccan, and wanted to have them taken away in helicopter (like in Iran), and Moroccan authority did not want to open their sky to an american helicopter.

I bring to the attention of the scenarist that Moroccan army, Moroccan emergency services and international emergency companies like Europ Assistance have available a certain number of helicopters, and that, in any case, nobody would ever leave a wounded woman bleeding and risking her life in a place like depicted in the movie - and even in Tazzarine - for more than one day before help arrives. Moroccan civil services can be surprising, but they have, as Americans, a good sense of priorities.

(writing that I find it so stupid I really have to check on Babel's website, yes, it's for more than a day... )

And, cherry on the cake, the suture episod... Cate is bleeding, her wound must be stitched, and the bus driver looked for a doctor. The only doctor in Tazzarine... which will be a vet (and an old man, you see, not the style to have learned his tradein Casablanca's university). He will make the stitch with a big needle hardly sterilized on the flamme of a lighter, with a thread not so clean, which you don't want to imagine where it was before.

Nowadays, only the most remote places in the mountains have no nurse. In Tazzarine, not only have we two ambulances, we also have, permanently, a nurse, and there is a doctor. Nurse whom I met last time I was there. And who uses the most sterilized material, for example for the circumcison !

I agree, in a way I'm nitpicking. I focused on Tazzarine, because I was told the movie took place here. Instead of Tazzarine, it would have been a small village lost at the end of a track, in Saro or Jebel Kissan, I would haven't been disturbed by all these details.
But that story does not make sense either. It is impossible to bring such a Pullmann bus in such a place, so remote places at the end of a few off-road drive.

That's a small Berber villge in High Atlas

I can't have an enlightened opinion on the plausibility of the japanese part, I don't know this culture, I might be surprised by things which are possible...

In a way, it is a pity to remain outside of a story for such details. The purpose of Babel is not to describe Morocco, it is to show, in all parts of the world, people isolated in their sufferings and problems, at the same time very far away one from the others, in different situations, and at the same time very near and similar (well... if I understood correctly). But the film speaks (and not so well) of a place I love, it uses the name of Tazzarine, it pretends to show the life in this village, and what he shows is false. Would it have been so difficult to take another name ? Even to invent one ?

Tazzarine is already not so well treated in Lonely Planet and other guides, who pretend there is nothing to see... if it presented like a middle of nowhere, without ambulance, doctor, hotel, cyber...

On the other hand, one thing I really love was the photo. Sets are splendid, and, to fit with the dark mood, the sun is away. Landscapes, under this heavy blanket of clouds, are muted, red, ocher, dark, and splendid. Our country is beautiful under the sun, and beautiful also without sun...

Palm grove in Skoura

And I'm obviously not the only one to think so ! See here