“I’ve never seen such a maelstrom of bad taste and pure magic,” says the young actress Nellie LaRoy in Babylon, played by Margot Robbie, at one point, and with that sentence alone describes the entire production of Damien Chazelle in the most comprehensive way possible .
Something between kitsch and art.
The extravagance boils down to the director’s desire to stun us with surreal scenes, circus acts, a scene from Terminator, drugs, orgies, a scene from Avatar, outright racism, jazz music, LGBT themes, class superiority, a rattlesnake fight, mobsters , “silent” Hollywood stars, self-styled critics gathered in 3 hours and 10 minutes.
If you are already dizzy and sick, it is not good, because we are still at the beginning. These are just the main plot lines of the movie, so let’s keep digging.
Babylon is an attraction that is twinned in idea with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It has the same choral structure, placing three characters at the core of the narrative, each trying to find their place under the California sun. And if the similarities don’t end there, two of the stars of “Babylon” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” match – Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt.
Now let’s start with the differences.
Damien Chazelle’s film draws its energy from the madness of 1920s Hollywood, when the cinema scene was a decadent and bohemian playground. A haven for acrobats dividing their time between Dionysian parties, wasted filmmaking, sexual promiscuity, grand ambitions and disastrous fates.
“Babylon” is an exhausting parade of these imposing scenes, but behind it lies a rare gem. I challenge you to discover it yourself by following the three-part composition in the script.
Chapter I: The Gates of Heaven
Minutes after sitting down in the movie theater, you’re plunged into a “burning building” where every floor is seething with sex, cocaine, and ridiculous deaths. In the first moment, the center is the music and the atmosphere of “The Great Gatsby”, until the rising star Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) appears in front of the camera.
Dressed in a skimpy red dress and accompanied by aspiring Manny Torres (Diego Calva), she enters a club and immediately lights it up, a visual metaphor that her stardom comes from within.
Manny and Nelly are like a twisted version of the La La Land couple. Instead of taking a romantic walk in the moonlight, shortly after meeting, the two bury their noses in a bag of drugs. Instead of tapping the steppe on the hill, they dive into the lust of the city. After tonight, Manny will leave in love and Nellie – famous.
Parallel to their conceived relationship, the most famous actor of his time, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), parks in front of the club, and he excuses himself in Italian to his wife. By the end of the scandal, the two divorce, and Jack enters the club to comfort his best friend George, dumped once again by a woman who is above his level.
The sequence in the opening part of “Babylon” is misleading. Gradually, the film branches out into multiple narrative points, as the year of the action is a cornerstone for the plot. Cinema is in the midst of a huge revolution – the end of “silent” films and the beginning of voiced productions.
The transition will affect the entire Hollywood machine. Some will climb to the top faster, and others will find themselves in a Sisyphean situation – just as they have reached the top, they will roll back to the bottom.
Chapter II: Party, Hangover, Moral Education
The initial trance of the characters soaked in all kinds of substances (water, alcohol, urine, semen and food) already sobers up and gradually moves to the nightmarish side of the story.
It is not known from where in “Babylon” a new character appears – the public moral judge, whose external decency is closer to the divine than to the human. It suddenly became unacceptable to reach into a strange man’s pants, kiss him, and then drug yourself into oblivion with him.
Unbeknownst to anyone, beauty has ceased to be the only measure of talent, and actors in their 20s don’t know where they stand according to the new criteria.
A new stratum of people has emerged who publicly demonstrate the high authority of their ball gowns, slim cigarettes and lavish hairstyles. And while no one is looking, they give in to their primal sexual urges and the racism and homophobia that was converging at that time in the United States.
Whole nests of characters have formed around Manny, Nellie and Jack, pulling them to embrace the changes and the new Puritan circle to keep up with the revolution in the seventh art instead of falling behind.
Reality in “Babylon” splits into two worlds – one for public and one for private.
Chapter III: At the end of the cinema
The cocoon of Hollywood is now not only rotting, but stinking. Joining the chessboard of characters are mafia organizations that have become a permanent part of the Hollywood landscape because of their most valuable asset – money.
The acting in this segment is already dynamite. Manny Torres has long ceased to be just a dreamer, Nellie LaRoy is not just a star with potential, and Jack Conrad is moving on to the greatest fear of any of his colleagues – aging.
If in the first two parts of “Babylon” the actors are like puppets on strings for Chazelle’s ideas, in the finale they take control and concentrate the narrative entirely on themselves. For a moment, the huge transformation of cinema does not matter, because before us we observe a game of the 9th degree on the Richter scale.
The thread of illusion and reality eventually breaks, and the characters are forced to look in the mirror and assess whether they like the image that chasing their dreams has sculpted.
Then we return to the cinema again with a palette of the best of the new creation. Minutes before the final credits, Damien Chazelle asks the audience the most important question (for him and for his profession) – should we stop evolution just because we don’t like the direction it’s going. Only because there is a danger of being left behind in its development.
There is no moral lesson from “Babylon”, although the film has a biblical title.
So if you’ve made it to this part of the review, you only have to answer the question: does this telling of the story strike you as more bad taste or pure magic.
THE VERDICT for “Babylon”:
