You thought this city needed you, but it doesn’t. Because she is older than you.
There is a resigned awareness in the words spoken in Babylon by reporter Elinor St. John to Jack Conrad, a former silent star whose career is going through an inexorable decline. It is an awareness tinged with melancholy, but also accompanied by a ruthless lucidity, the result of the clinical eye of a journalist who, from behind the scenes, manages to grasp the spirit of her era with unerring precision (and often even to anticipate it). After all, what greater proof of lucidity than comparing oneself to a cockroach? “Have you ever noticed that when a house burns down, the cockroaches survive?“, is Elinor’s lapidary gloss, while Jack scrambles to wonder about his precarious future. But even if the house is reduced to ashes, if Jack and so many other stars – together with him and after him – disappear in the flames, however they will be lucky enough to continue to exist for entire generations to come: “You will spend eternity among angels and ghosts“.
Similar to George Sanders’ cynical Addison DeWitt in the immortal All About Eve, Elinor St. John, to whom the superfine Jean Smart lends her face and voice, has a privileged point of view on the world of show-business: she is tangentially part of it , without ever being in the spotlight, but for this very reason he is able to observe Babylon around him without being blinded by its light. And within a glowing and hyperkinetic film, the long dialogue between her and Jack constitutes a subduedly painful moment: because Elinor, with the calm authority that Jean Smart gives her, has the task of illustrating the ‘industrial’ nature of the ” dream factory” in Hollywood. A cruel nature perhaps, but which does not preclude the magic component inherent in cinema, her promise of immortality: a dichotomy that is the pivot of Damien Chazelle’s work and from which the splendors and miseries of her characters originate.
Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood Babylon
Released almost in unison with another magnificent film dedicated to the seventh art, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (where, however, the attention is focused on the creative energy of those behind the camera), Babylon could settle, with the passing over the years, as one of the most important Hollywood films ever made. Trusting that time will prove more generous towards the monumental fresco painted by Damien Chazelle, ineluctably divisive and faced a predictable fiasco: a fate that has already befallen many large or very large titles, which have required a certain distance to see their full value recognized. This, moreover, is the risk of ambition: and ambition, in Babylon, appears huge, at times even crazy. Starting from the very idea, in the post-pandemic reality of 2022, to shoot a three-hour blockbuster on the Hollywood of almost a century ago, in which the ones who dream they lack the soothing innocence of the protagonists of La La Land.
Babylon in fact, it represents the other face, or rather the dark side, of the very popular musical directed in 2016 by Damien Chazelle, who became the youngest director awarded an Oscar at the age of thirty-two. The superficial similarities between the two films – the cinephilia cloaked in quotations, the couple of outsiders who dream of breaking into the world of entertainment – are counterbalanced by a radically different spirit: if in La La Land Hollywood is synonymous with dedication, romanticism, pure wonder that takes on the dreamy tones of Vincente Minnelli and the pastel shades of Jacques Demy, Babylon opens on the droppings of an elephant in the torrid desolation of the Californian landscape and continues with the frenzied sequence of a wild party that lasts until the end of the night. And if Emma Stone’s Mia Dolan, framed under an Ingrid Bergman poster, embodied the delicate sweetness ofingenuethe Nellie LaRoy of Margot Robbie it is an explosive concentration – and in constant movement – of irrepressible sensuality and unhealthy madness.
Babylon, the review: a film “full of piss and wind”
The ones who dream: rising talents and shooting stars
“You don’t become a star: either you are or you aren’t“, declares the young woman confidently, while in her skimpy fiery red dress she stamps a mark on the heart of Manny Torres of diego bald. With a dazzling expressiveness captured several times while she stands on the counter of a fake saloon, Nellie doesn’t delay in eclipsing the star of the moment, launching herself into that parable of ascent and self-destruction that is the quintessential Hollywood paradigm. Around her Damien Chazelle paints a swirl of memorable supporting actors, starting with Jack Conrad of Brad Pitt, almost an epitome of Roaring Twenties stardom: impassive even in the delirious chaos of the set, cloaked in a miraculous ray of light in the last take of the day. But Jack longs for progress without realizing that he himself will remain crushed between his gears: a phone call is enough for him to convince Gloria Swanson to join him in a new film, but in the meantime he is on the same “sunset avenue” as Norma Desmond.
The bitter irony of BabylonHowever, it never precludes Chazelle’s empathy for his protagonists. Jack, awkwardly trying his hand at sound, may be ridiculed like Singin’ in the Rain’s Lina Lamont, but the audience’s laughter comes to him – and to us – like stab wounds. Just as we feel trumpeter Sidney Palmer’s (Jovan Adepo) searing humiliation when he is forced to dye his face because he doesn’t look black enough; or the sense of defeat of Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a cabaret artist who with blatant anachronism pays homage to the ambiguous charm of Morocco’s Marlene Dietrich, complete with a sapphic kiss, but will be confined to the parties by dragon lady before his final exile from Hollywood. In a Babylon where ethnic groups and languages mix, Chazelle often puts us in the perspective of outsiders: the African American Sidney, the Chinese (and lesbian) Fay and obviously the Mexican Manuel, alias Manny, who if necessary pretends to be Spanish while moves with a soft step on the edge of the studio system.
Babylon: because it’s the flip side of La La Land
A great film between horror and wonder
The celebration of cinema, from the parallel scenes of a frenetic day on the set to the montage that, immediately before the end credits, transports us from the Lumière brothers to the present, does not prevent Chazelle from showcasing their exhausting excesses, inhuman workaholism, the moralistic hypocrisies (the ostracism against Nellie seems to allude to the advent of the Hays Code). And for those who grew up loving the iconography of classic Hollywood, how is it possible not to be won over by a film so defiantly overloaded, dazzling, all-encompassing? A film that in the space of one hundred and eighty minutes, to the syncopated rhythm of the music of the faithful Justin Hurwitz, would like to tell us everything and the opposite of everything; which recalls entire sequences of Singing in the raintitle song included, but later plunges us – literally – into the bowels of the Los Angeles jet-set, into that horrifying underground world in which monstrous creatures and ravenous beasts materialize.
Inserting such a digression, a catabasis that will force Manny to probe the depths of human abjection, would already be enough to demonstrate the boundless courage of a film like Babylon, but even more of his vocation for failure. Because a work based on absolute contrasts, in which beauty and disgust coexist in equal measure, in which one rushes headlong between enthusiasm and desperation, is in itself destined to divide and abdicates any hypothesis of plebiscite. Damien Chazelle’s is therefore a very tough bet, but one for which we couldn’t be more grateful: because regardless of the immediate results and easy labels, it is thanks to films of this kind that cinema remains, after more than a century, the most exciting and most daring of the arts. And well before that ending, the clear emotion that explodes in Diego Calva’s tears, Babylon he had already managed to remind us of it, as well as to remind us of the crystalline talent of its author.
Babylon, Chazelle in Rome: “I wanted the film not to slip away quietly. I wanted to make noise”
