Babel

THERE ARE FEW PERIODS IN the day, in many Los Angeles office complexes, more arresting than the one between five and seven in the evening. At five, the white-collar workers can be seen piling out of elevators and striding through air-conditioned lobbies, headed for parking lot, traffic jam and home. For a time, there is silence, with only spasms of desultory banter from the security guards to punctuate the stillness.

In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed. The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that. So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own language, something simple that would help clarify her thinking. She called it Toki Pona -- "good language" -- and gave it just 120 words. "Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."

On May 15, 1939, Isaac Babel, a writer whose distinction had earned him the Soviet privilege of a dacha in the country, was arrested at Peredelkino and taken to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison, headquarters of the secret police. His papers were confiscated and destroyed--among them half-completed stories, plays, film scripts, translations. Six months later, after three days and nights of hellish interrogation, he confessed to a false charge of espionage.

If somebody is clever enough, Tom Stoppard once wrote, you can persuade that person of anything; people can also perhaps persuade themselves and others that they have written something readable, even significant. Antonia Byatt's new novel, "Babel Tower," has just been published in London to reviews that, if mostly baffled in tone, treat book and author with an odd reverence. Mystification, detachment, fear of uncertainty, of life, are no substitute for inspiration and wit.

ALEJANDRO Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel" weaves vivid narrative vignettes set in Morocco, Mexico, the U.S. and Japan into a sprawling meditation on the universality of the human condition -- loss, love, the misery of miscommunication, the uplift of grace. Uniquely arresting among tens of protagonists is Chieko, an impetuous, deaf-mute Tokyo teenager grappling with her mother's suicide and her own transition into womanhood.

The gritty, globe-trotting drama "Babel" continued to be an award-season standout Thursday, picking up three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's critically acclaimed film weaving together four seemingly disconnected story lines earned a nod for its ensemble cast, which includes Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as a couple whose trip to Morocco takes a tragic turn.

"The Departed," "Babel," "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Dreamgirls" dominated the Broadcast Film Critics Assn.'s nominees for the 12th annual Critics' Choice Awards on Tuesday with seven nods each. Also competing for best picture are "Blood Diamond," "Letters From Iwo Jima," "Little Children," "Notes on a Scandal," "The Queen" and "United 93." "Letters," which is in Japanese with English subtitles, is also nominated for best foreign film -- a first in the awards' history.

FROM: Cheryl Greer, 39, a faculty member of Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. Greer, who leads seminars and workshops on diversity training, proposes that school districts introduce an anti-bias perspective in their curricula--beginning in preschool--that teaches children to be critical thinkers. Such a curriculum recognizes and explores differences in people by including diversity in all subject matter. It is not a separate discipline, like ethnic studies.

When John Lesher sold a film project to Paramount Pictures Corp. last year, the Hollywood talent agent couldn't have imagined he'd end up shepherding the movie into theaters as head of the studio's new specialty unit. "Babel," an intense drama starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, opened over the weekend, Lesher's first release under the Paramount Vantage banner.