Babylon, the film directed and written by Damien Chazelle is in theaters from January 19, 2023. Paramount Pictures presents a production Marc Platt, Wild Chickens e Organism Pictures distributed by Eagle Pictures. The director of La La Land e Whiplash creates a memorable story set in the The Angels from the 1920s. Babylon is a story of outrageous ambition and outrageous excess, tracing the rise and fall of multiple characters in an age of wanton decadence and depravity in the glitzy Hollywood.
The rich choral cast consists of Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde.
Babylon, the review
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Damien Chazelle he is the youngest director to have won a Oscar (2017, La La Land) and for many considered the present and future of cinema. After the faux pas of First Man, his new movie Babylon carries out an extraordinary work of rewriting and deconstructing the history of cinema. We are in the late 20’s. A film producer, industry tycoon is throwing one of his massive parties in full style Grande Gatsby. To this party everything is allowed. Every type of drug, alcohol, sex, gambling, every perversion and freedom of the deepest mind is let go. There is no shortage of people in overdoseorgies, all surrounded by music jazz exhibited live.
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In the courtyard adjacent to the party, a woman arrives with her car – stolen – and crashes into a statue. She says she’s an actress and has an invitation. The woman says her name is Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who thanks to the help of the house handyman, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva) manages to enter and put on a show by dancing between the tables. Unrestrained dancing and explicit sensual effusions are the setting for a party that is only the prelude, a long prologue to a film that starts at a thousand miles an hour, without giving you a breather.
Call me the wild girl
«When I moved to Hollywood, the stars on all the doors said ‘No Actors and No Dogs’ – I changed that.” Also Manny aspires to work in the cinema and thanks to a chance meeting with the star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), finds himself on a period film set. Nellie e Manuel will find themselves juggling scandals, sexual abuse, complaints, excesses and mysteries that still populate the world of star system.
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Nellie LaRoy is a girl who comes from New Jersey, she has an innate talent, kept in the shadows for a long time, but which cannot detach herself from her whimsical and exuberant being, struggling to align with the good tone of the film industry. Several scenes see Margot Robbie protagonist and are certainly already iconic for his – once again – exemplary interpretation. Nellie she has a difficult past, she carries with her the consequences of what she has been through and no matter how hard she tries, the problems come back to her. The desire to be a star added to the awareness of having always been one, best represent her decadent character and perhaps even dandy. Margot Robbie it’s a loose cannon. She dances, sniffs cocaine, drinks, gambles and in a couple of scenes she evokes two of her characters from previous films. In the dynamics of the story, Nellie LaRoy recalls both the rise and subsequent fall of Tonya Harding (Tonya, 2018) e Sharon Tate (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 2019), in the scene where he goes to see himself at the cinema.
The advent of sound
The first part of the movie Babylon is a technical show of photography, direction and music. Chazelle also for this film he relies on trusted collaborators Linus Sandgren (cinematographer) e Justin Hurwitz (already winner of Golden Globe). The meta-cinema sequence where we see the course of filming of the film starring Jack Conrad, it is a cinematic poem. Long shots and wide-angle shots show us an epic battle, with the technology of the time, complete with a musical ensemble playing live on the set. The accidents are not few and in their representation, they are so grotesque that they trigger a smile, even though the dead run away.
“Good night my Love”
Se in La La Land the sound, the music was the romantic, friendly, loving part of the story, in the film Babylon the advent of sound is seen almost as an obstacle. The difficulties of managing this change is well represented both in the technical and practical part of the workers – even a sneeze can be incisive – and in the silent film actors and the relationship with their voice. From the apex, from the rise of the protagonists and the faces of the stars major, the decline of their careers has been drastic. There is change, there are new figures (the sound engineers), but at the same time the awareness that the industry is changing and there is no turning back.
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In this machine that evolves and continues with its head down, whoever has the intuitions goes ahead. If you fall behind you are lost. This is the case with Manny who has the brilliant idea of putting musicians (all black jazz musicians) on stage, creating a new type of entertainment. From here the advent of sound develops with the reference to the film that marked the birth of sound cinema, Jazz singer.
Racism, actors who make up to look even more black, unstable and fake marriages, all elements of an apparently magical world. In reality, it is a conceptual place where death is also present, mentioned several times as something fake, staged on the set, but which exists.
A climax that seems to have no end
Who has never dreamed Hollywood? The vision of Chazelle which reconstructs a history of cinema through archival images, gives us something that has never been clearer than this. We laugh, we cry, there is also horror and the unusual Tobey Macguirema Babylon certainly remains an evolutionary step in the production of Chazelle. After the flop of First Man the director managed to lift himself up, writing and directing something crazy yet thoughtful. About a time when cinema was fundamental for the world industry but revealing macabre and obscure realities that we spectators often don’t want to see.
Singin’ in the rain
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In 3 hours and 5 minutes of film, Babylon seems to never be able to close a climax started at the beginning of the story, towards a closure that recalls the cinema of Kubrick more than anything else. The hedonism of a Hollywood that no longer exists, in a vision of Singin’ in the Rain different, hypnotic but moving. A vision, that of Chazelle which makes us reflect on the fact that every time needs a narrator to refresh our memory of what has been. To understand how far we have reached and how obsolete we have now become. In the case of cinema, slave and devoted to the demands of the producers.
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