5. Babel - Winner: The Wind That Shakes The Barley (Ken Loach - United Kingdom)
Twelve years prior, Quentin Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or. Three stories ("Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife," "The Gold Watch," and "The Bonnie Situation") are linked by characters with each story influencing and/or influenced by one of the others. "Babel" tells the story of four families entangled by one common entity. That entity, which could be argued as the MacGuffin, is a Winchester rifle. A Moroccan man sells a .270 Winchester M70 rifle to a neighbor of his. Two of the new owner's kids take the rifle to try it out. To test the range, one of the boys aims at a bus driving on a road a few hundred meters away. The bullet goes through a window on the bus and strikes Susan Jones (Cate Blanchett), an American woman on vacation with her husband Richard (Brad Pitt), severely wounding her. Miles from modern civilization, their options and resources are very limited with time being their biggest enemy. As a result of Susan being shot, she and Richard are not able to return home from their vacation on time. This causes a Mexican woman, working illegally in the United States as a nanny for the Jones' kids, to miss a family wedding. Richard and Susan Jones had planned on coming home in time for the nanny to attend the wedding. We later learn that the Moroccan man who sold the rifle to his neighbor originally received the rifle as a gift from a Japanese widower. The widower has a teenaged daughter who is deaf and sexually unsatisfied. The four families are all directly affected by the rifle. Each family is impacted dramatically by the sale and use of the rifle, either short-term or long-term. And with each family frustrated with the effect the rifle has on them, either known or unbeknownst to them, the possibility of a satisfactory outcome becomes more uncertain. These stories show that nothing is certain. God, or a higher power of any kind, does not control anyone's fate. Each family is affected by pure chance.