Babel
2010 · 15m · France
Directed by Hendrick Dusollier
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
From the celestial mountains to the summit of Shanghai's towers, two young peasants leave their village to reach the megalopolis, replaying the myth of Babel in a city caught between tradition and frantic modernity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's doing the mythic-collision thing that a hundred other films have tried since the 2000s art-house boom—peasants meet modernity, tradition gets swallowed, very sad, very expected. The surrealism feels obligatory rather than genuinely disorienting.
Dusollier understands how to compose a frame as an argument between vertical registers—the peasants literally climbing through Shanghai's architecture becomes a visual essay on cultural stratification that refuses easy sentiment. The formal discipline here is earned and precise.
That choice to shoot the ascent through the city as a series of layered, compressed planes rather than linear progression—it's a single structural decision that reframes the entire myth and makes the budget constraints feel like aesthetic necessity rather than limitation.
Reviews
Le prodige Français revisite le mythe antique de manière toute personnelle et le transpose dans l'Empire du Milieu, à Shanghai, une ville en pleine mutation qui vit au rythme effréné du changement et des transformations. On pense à l'esthétisme de Wong Kar-Wai mais ce serait faire preuve d'un esprit bien étriqué que de ne pas reconnaître l'originalité de ce faiseur d'images inédites et atypiques qui pose un regard moderne sur les métamorphoses d'une ville et d'un monde en éternelle effervescence dans une apnée visuelle et artistique à couper le souffle.