The women

Casa de los Babys

(2003)

Well, I've confirmed one suspicion anyway: when I first saw John Sayles's treatment of genetic imperialism at the late lamented York Square Cinema, the English subtitles were missing from the first couple of reels not because Sayles was forcing us stumblers in Spanish to deal with the uncertainly of communication that partly defines the relationship between the U.S. women in the film and the residents of the unnamed Latin American country to which they come to adopt babies. No, it was because the distributor mistakenly sent the York Square a couple of reels sin subtitulos, and the theater's management was too dim to get the error corrected.

Actually, I confirmed two suspicions, the other being that it didn't really matter much if you got every single word of that stretch: Sayles is pretty inscrutable regardless. The film is certainly not an endorsement of exploiting poverty in the name of saving one baby at a time from it, but neither does it shy from the undeniable truth that well-intentioned people of means are in fact able to provide advantages that are out of reach to any of the past-adoption-age children we see squeegying windshields and huffing paint fumes. The sometimes unsubtle Sayles is content to leave us in the middle of complexity here--which is sort of satisfyingly frustrating.