Depravity and wonder, the exhausting and indispensable soundtrack, the universe shared with La La Land but above all jazz as a backbone. In our in-depth analysis we explain why Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is so similar to John Coltrane’s groundbreaking album Ascension.
As the film comes to life, structure and above all body, a feeling rises strongly: Babylon shares the same universe as La La LandOf Whiplasheven of the underrated First Man (Is there anything more conceited and grandiose about wanting to reach the moon?). The matrix is almost identical, although there is an even more bitter and irrational drive, the result of a historical evolution that would later bring about a certain disillusionment, well hidden behind the spotlights of an elusive Hollywood, today weakened yet still alive. Director, Damien Chazellewhich probably touches the highest peak so far, said that Babylon is a film made for “make noise” (here you can find our report of the Italian press meeting). Almost an understatement, given that his extraordinary film clearly seems like a sort of huge and gigantic middle finger to showbiz, capable of sanctifying and cursing, of creating and then destroying. The time for a clapperboard, a première gone wrong, a chat drowned in whiskey.
A noise, that of Babylon, which is structured like a long and painful solo. An overflowing stream of consciousness, in which the cinematographic laws refer clearly and directly to the free laws of jazz, from which Chazelle, madly in love, even extrapolates the staging. A connection that we want to deepen, starting from the shared reality of Babylon in relation to the director’s previous titles: ambition as an extreme human propensity, the fallibility of humanity itself, the sense of dream and sacrifice, while the public enemies of art are compromise, acceptance, homologation.
Chazelle’s universe and jazz as a backbone
Think about it: Miles Teller in Whiplash dripped blood from his hands, pursuing a perfection applicable only by divinities (and John Coltrane and Miles Davis are, yes they are), Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, in La La Land, are then the direct consequence of the deconstruction of the Hollywood dream, pushed to the maximum limits of an era marked by profound changes. And the change, the perception of time running out leaving us behind, is the same that pours violently on Jack Conrad alias Brad Pittsilent film actor who can no longer find a balance after the de revolution The Jazz Singer, the first sound film in history. It was 1927.
The same balance that the graceless and blinding Nellie LaRoy does not want to give in to Margot Robbie (as we tell you in our review she is getting better and better), aspiring actress with a drug habit, however capable of crying like the great stars who would later populate the Cinemascope. Ambitions, carnal desires, self-destruction, despair, celebration, abominations. Absolute emphasis on the main concepts of Damien Chazelle in newly born Hollywood, and intentionally considered as a sort of spiritual prequel of the same La La Land, Babylon it responds to the director’s needs in terms of expression, extricating itself from frills and dogmas. What better way, then, than to entrust the flow (and fluids…) of Babylon to the currents of jazz?
Babylon, the review: a film “full of piss and wind”
John Coltrane’s Babylon and the Chaos
The amazing music of Justin Hurwitz – pernicious, splashy, annoying, irresistible – which autocites here and there the nuances of the score La La Land is the backbone of the film but, diving into the parallels, Chazelle’s fifth feature is the closest thing there can be to Ascension by John Coltrane. A revolutionary, revealing album, explosive in its dispassionate subversion and in its astonishing disenchantment. Released in 1966, it was immediately seen as a kind of experimentation, halfway between classic jazz and free jazz. The tones and moods are often difficult and elusive, the articulation does not follow a precise pattern and is left to the personal approach of the listener to the album. A milestone album for the history of music, capable of demonstrating how poisonous and counterproductive rules in art are. Listening to him, everything seems to be left to chance, yet Coltrane’s rhythmic study refers, right from the title, to the search for ascension brought about by chaos, extrapolated from human instincts among other things. The musical colors chase each other frantically, the seconds pass slowly and then quickly, it is an album as classic as it is futuristic.
From the same ascension spectrum of the jazzDamien Chazelle pulls off the reveal of Babylon: a film that starts with excrement and ends with the sublimation of the color image imprinted on the big screen, as if to demonstrate that cinema is the maximum sacred, vivid and immortal dimension (as the true protagonist of the film, Manuel Torres, from diego bald). In between, the bustle and transformation that rest on the same center. A convulsive, sinful, instinctive, indomitable center. Like the self-absorbed and haughty tones of Ascension, like the sumptuous and tragic ones of Babylon. Jazz and cinema, human elevation in free fall. Going down to go up, looking at a white sheet that is about to light up with life and love.
Babylon: because it’s the flip side of La La Land
