Sometimes filmmakers try to pick mysterious and alluring titles for their work, but it’s impossible to imagine “Babies” from French documentary director Thomas Balmés, by any other name. This movie isn’t just about babies—it is babies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If spending a weekend watching your sister’s kids was like running a 5k, then this movie is the baby marathon.

The only thing competing for our attention with the babies is the inherently self-conscious filmmaking. While so many Hollywood movies aim at complete formal invisibility—such that the audience becomes the main character, or the unnoticed fly-on-the-wall— “Babies” self-imposes a number of curious and courageous restrictions on itself. The film is a high-quality nature documentary about human infants from four countries. And yet, there is no voice over and nearly no cinematic narrative techniques. There are no interviews and not even subtitles for the parents from Japan, Namibia and Mongolia. Speech from the San Franciscan couple is muffled and not the focus.

So while the film itself is completely contented to observe its subjects, the audience is left largely directionless. Balmés must feel as if any guidance is unethical manipulation. But people can rarely maintain such specific, unified focus as this film might desire. People, like babies, want to explore and learn. It’s a testament to our creativeand analytical faculties to read meaning into this framework when the only thing to go on is the concept for the film. Four babies from different cultures are shown growing up together through the early stages of development. It sounds kind of new agey and it is. This film is much less scientific than an anthropological survey, and it doesn’t analyze humans as just another species in a nature documentary. What’s brought to light in the film isn’t in the film at all, but in everyone who sees it.

Even with complete disregard for narrative themes, they still emerge. Little Bayar, Hattie, Mari and Ponijao explore their environments, contend with fratricidal older siblings, gradually develop and begin to learn cultural and gender roles. But the real theme is the universality of those experiences. At first, the differences are most obvious between countries—then the similarities. Of course we all started out as children too, so aren’t we all the same?

It’s a good thing the film doesn’t preach these morals to us, but there is a small smugness in the inevitability of their discovery by our own hands. The movie is an easy pill to swallow with a sweet face to sell it to you.

There’s no sob story as in so many films with morals, just adorable babies. Babies with the occasional kitten or dog which is the cutest thing imaginable.

Besides being cute, this film is on occasion pretty funny. It’s also nonintrusive, nonjudgmental, and unapologetically honest. Some scenes show nudity while others show bodily functions and food preparation. The film is never dirty which has a lot to do with the impeccable lighting. The cinematography is beautiful and the colors and compositions gorgeous.

Even at a brisk 79 minutes, it starts to feel long without any continuity of plot to hold our attention. It would be great to watch at home on TV or DVD. When I saw it at the screening room, at least one famous Chicago critic was catching some z’s. But even if you do fall asleep to “Babies,” you are sure to have good dreams.