Old-Hat Reviews: Babies

[Maud thinks: Babies. Yes, this sounds like a good choice for an evening when I'm home alone and have lately been pondering the question of a third child in a manner probably not altogether un-premenstrual.]

I'd heard of the film before, but not gone out of my way to see it. Then the other day someone told me it was available for instant play on Netflix, and last night B was out and my blog post was all written and the kids were asleep, so I hacked into our account (that means I had a lucky guess and remembered the password first time) and watched it.

It's a beautifully shot story without words that follows four babies in radically different parts of the world from birth to their first steps. The babies live, respectively, with a tribe in Namibia, in a yurt in Mongolia (you'd be amazed how much furniture they fit in a yurt (I like saying yurt)), in a high-rise apartment in Tokyo, and in San Francisco.

I love San Francisco, Tokyo looks uber-cool, and the windswept grasslands and big skies of Mongolia were amazing, but it was the little Namibian girl who stole my heart - all plump chocolate limbs and mischevious eyes, growing and learning in an environment so alien to anywhere I've ever been: the phrases "third world" and "developing world" are meaningless here - these people live without money because they don't need anything that requires money (or at least that's how it's, perhaps romantically, portrayed). They laugh and chat and braid their children's hair, and the babies put unsuitable things in their mouths and imitate their mothers just like babies do everywhere.

Some highlights:

• The nurse in Mongolia parcelling up the new baby in the tightest swaddle I've ever seen, finished off with two ribbons like a present - and then his mother bringing him outside and hopping (painfully) onto the back of her husband's motorbike, swaddled infant in arms, to bring him home. And off they rode, across the fields.
  
• The unmistakeable "am pooing now" series of expressions that crossed baby Hattie's face (San Francisco) as she sat on the floor.
• Namibia baby putting out her tongue to get the dog to lick it.
• All the Tokyo mothers bringing their babies to the zoo, placing them feet from enormous gorillas and prowling tigers (separated by just a pane of glass) and seeming surprised when the babies, very sensibly, burst into wails of terror.
• Mongolia baby's big brother pushing him outside in the stroller, apparently unsupervised, and abandoning him in the field with all the cows. As if to say, "There. Now you can't come back, and I will reign supreme once more."
• A beautifully plumed rooster hopping up on the bed in the yurt and then stepping carefully around the sleeping infant.
  

My inner anthropologist seems to think that we were all meant to live around a campfire in a desert or a cave, with the rest of our tribe; that clearly the way of the tribe is the one true way for humankind. (This is not actually true.) But apart from that, the oustanding contrast to me in the lives of these babies was how the San Francisco and Tokyo babies were only/first children who spent their time mostly in the company of adults, only seeing peers in artificial, organized settings like yoga or music classes; while the two rural babies had siblings and others of similar ages around all the time; loving, teaching, and persecuting them in equal measure.

Now, I'm the last person to cast aspersions on only children (being a high-functioning only child myself) but the latter model seemed much healthier, much righter to me. It goes back to the idea that the best way to parent may be to provide your kids with other children to interact with (they don't have to be related), and then ignore them all as much as you possibly can. (Preferably while you share a bottle of wine and some good conversation with the other parents.)