Summary
We see a man, Abdullah the goatherder, walking through a desert in Morocco. He knocks on the door of his neighbor, Hassan Ibraham, and goes inside a home, where he purchases a rifle (a .270 Winchester M70). Hassan charges him 1000 dirhams for it and Abdullah offers him 500 and a goat instead. Hassan laughs and agrees, telling Abdullah that the rifle will help him and his sons kill many jackals, who have been preying on his goats. He shoots the rifle to demonstrate, then offers the rifle to Abdullah's sons, who fight over it.
The older boy, Ahmed, shoots the rifle poorly, then the younger one, Yussef takes it. Yussef hits the target better than his older brother, and Ahmed looks disappointed. Abdullah instructs his sons to kill at least three jackals and Hassan tells them to hide the rifle from any passersby.
Through a hole in wall, Yussef spies on a girl, Zohra, taking off her clothes, while Ahmed calls to him and urges him to come shoot at the jackals. When they see a jackal, Ahmed unsuccessfully shoots at it and the goats scatter. Sitting under a tree, Yussef tells his brother that the girl, Zohra, doesn't mind that he spies on her. "She doesn't, but I do," Ahmed says, threatening to tell their father. Yussef gets upset and walks away to masturbate in private.
Ahmed takes the gun and shoots at the side of the hill, saying that Hassan said it could shoot three kilometers. Yussef takes the rifle and shoots at the rock, but Ahmed is frustrated and takes the rifle to the top of the hill. "I bet the bullet can't hit that far," he says and shoots at a car passing by below. "You see? Nothing," he says, disappointed. A bus passes by and Yussef shoots at it. It seems like nothing has happened for a moment, but then they see the bus pull over and stop. Their eyes widening, the brothers run from the scene.
The scene shifts to two young American children, Debbie and Mike, hiding from their Mexican nanny, Amelia. Debbie jumps up and touches the "base" as the phone rings. When Amelia answers, the children's father, Richard, tells her that Susan, his wife, is doing better now after getting hit by a bullet on a tour bus in Morocco. "They're going to have to operate," he tells Amelia, before telling her that someone named Rachel is flying in that night and will find someone to take care of the kids so Amelia can go. He tells her not to tell the children anything then asks to speak to his son, Mike.
Mike picks up the phone and tells his father that someone brought hermit crabs into his class that day and that one bit him. The scene shifts and we see Amelia putting Mike to bed, asking if he has brushed his teeth. He smiles widely at her, and so does Debbie. Amelia kisses the kids goodnight and turns out the lights. After the nanny has left, Debbie calls to her and asks her to leave the light on. "I'm scared that what happened to Sam is gonna happen to me...Sam died while he was sleeping," Debbie says, but Amelia assures her that that won't happen and that only happens to some babies when they are very little. Amelia stays with the children until they fall asleep.
Amelia wakes up to the phone ringing. It's Richard, telling her that they have not found someone to look after the children. She tells him that it's her son's wedding, but he tells her to cancel the wedding and that he will pay for another. She tells him that she just needs that one day off, but he gets impatient, saying, "Susan's still recovering, and Rachel can't make it to take care of the kids." He won't take no for an answer and hangs up abruptly.
While the children watch cartoons, Amelia calls someone and begs them to look after the kids for her, but they cannot. She takes the children to the woman's house and tells her to pretend they are her niece and nephew. "Right, because they look so much like me," the woman says sarcastically. With no other options, Amelia decides to take the children with her to Mexico.
Amelia's nephew, Santiago, picks them up to bring them to Mexico. "Why bring them? They'll drive you crazy," Santiago says, skeptical of bringing them all the way to Mexico.
The scene shifts to Morocco, a flashback. We see Susan and Richard sitting down for a meal, where Richard orders chicken couscous and a Coke. Susan wants something without fat in it, then orders fried eggplant and a Diet Coke. When the waiter tells her they don't have Diet Coke, she is impatient. "Why did we come here?" she asks Richard, who tells her, "To be alone." Susan looks around then throws out the ice in Richard's glass insistent that the water is probably bad.
"Why are you so stressed?" he asks her, but she tells him that he's the reason she can't relax. "You don't think I tried?" she says, heartbroken, and he suggests that she's never going to forgive him.
We see Susan and Richard holding hands on the bus, and Susan leans against the window, withdrawing her hand. As the bus turns a corner, Susan gets hit in the shoulder by Yussef's bullet. Everyone on the bus begins to panic as they realize that Susan has been shot.
The scene shifts to Japan, where Chieko Wataya, a deaf teenager, is playing volleyball. When the referee says that the opposing team scored a point, Chieko becomes upset and walks off the court. In the locker room, Chieko's teammates confront her about giving attitude to the ref and causing them to lose the game. When one of them asks why she's in a bad mood, another says that she's always in a bad mood "because nobody's fucked her yet."
Chieko storms out of the locker room, as one of her friends tells her she'll see her at J-Pop. In the car, Chieko's dad, Yasujiro, asks what she wants to eat, but she tells him she's meeting her friends at J-Pop. "Didn't you tell me we'd have lunch together?" he says, but she tells him he never pays attention. "My mother always paid attention to me," she says. "I miss your mother too," Yasujiro says to her, adding, "I'm doing the best I can."
At J-Pop, Yasujiro reminds Chieko that she has a dentist appointment at three o'clock. Chieko goes inside and finds her friends. They look over at a cute boy nearby, who smiles back at them. "Do you like him?" one of her friends asks, and she smiles coyly.
Later, the girls go and play video games together, and one of the cute boys' friends comes over and asks if Chieko wants to have a drink with them. Chieko's friend asks him to speak slower and he realizes they are deaf. Discouraged by his discovery, the boy walks away and Chieko and her friend realize that the boys were making fun of her and her friends all along.
In the bathroom, Chieko complains to her friend, "They look at us like we're monsters," before going into a stall and taking off her underwear. "Now they're going to meet a real hairy monster," she says, before going back out into the bar. She sits down at the table and looks over at a table of boys, making eye contact with one of them, before flashing him. When the rest of the boys looks over, she flashes all of them, then laughs with her friend.
Looking at her phone, Chieko realizes she has a dentist appointment at three and tells her friend that she will see her later.
Analysis
The film drops the viewer down in Morocco, into the lives of a goatherder, Abdullah, and his two sons, who must defend their goats from some antagonistic jackals in the area. Rather than spend time setting up much exposition, director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu jumps right into the primal stakes of the characters' lives. The center of the story is a small corner of the world, a family's struggle to survive and make a living in the deserts of Morocco.
Soon enough, the localized story begins to ripple outwards and have effects on the people outside of Abdullah and his family's community, when a bullet from a rifle wounds an American woman traveling in Morocco. The film slowly begins to weave in different narratives and show how they intersect in unexpected ways. What starts as a relatively simple story blossoms into a puzzle about the interconnectedness of different lives.
The cycle of events is set into motion by a complete accident, a game played between two preadolescent boys. Standing on top of the hill, Ahmed and Yussef, the two rival brothers, shoot at cars passing by. Because of their youth and the fact that they are removed physically from the action of shooting a gun, they hardly take into account the real consequences of shooting at passing cars, until they see the bus pull over. The catastrophic violence that they incur comes as a surprise to them, the adult consequence of a childlike game.
Through the unusual interconnectedness of the characters we see some giant contrasts reflected in the geopolitical and socioeconomic differences between the characters. One moment we see Yussef and Ahmed running from their accidental crime scene in the Moroccan desert and the next we see Debbie and Mike, two affluent children, playing an innocent game and being tucked into bed by their adoring nanny. While all four of these children are shown in their innocent youths, unequipped to face the turmoil of the adult world, their contexts and their backgrounds could not be more different. The way that Iñárritu weaves together the different stories highlights these differences.
Additionally, Amelia's life is in stark contrast with the lives of the children she cares for. Richard seems like a helpful and thoughtful employer one moment, but when he cannot find someone to look after his children, he insists that Amelia miss her son's wedding to look after Debbie and Mike. We see that in the relationship between the white American and his Mexican nanny there is an innate inequality, a dynamic in which Richard's interests have absolute priority over Amelia's.
