Babylon Review: the new Damien Chazelle film starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt
Damien Chazelle lines up Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt for his new film Babylon, an epic of excess in the excesses of sunset Classical Hollywood.
Fortunately, there are still such films as Babylon: overflowing, exaggerated, spastic, unfinished, excessive, thought to be the best in the history of cinema but delivered ramshackle, misshapen, at times laughable. Yet alive, electric, pulsating.
Fortunately, there are still directors like Damien Chazelle., enfant prodige of the new Hollywood-who has taken from Hollywood (the youngest ever Best Director Oscar) and taken from it (the scandalous Best Picture Oscar denied to La La Land)-returns four years after his best film (First Man) with his craziest film yet, a three-hour orgy on the transition of the Hollywood film industry from silent to sound, on the waning of one era and the rise of another, on the collapse of a tower (of Babel) under its own weight, on the fading into black of a dream.
In order: an elephant in the desert around California spreads its huge anus and rains a cascade of shit on a laborer, Margot Robbie snorts coke a go and drives guests of a party where fat guests get pissed in the face by snickering mistresses, Brad Pitt is so drunk he can’t stand upright, three-fourths of the extras are naked or nearly so, having sex in every corner of the mansion, and an underage whore dies of an overdose choked on her own vomit in a bare room upstairs, while Chazelle’s room continues to be drawn to the musicians on the stage set up in the center of the living room because music, in his films, is always a maincharacter.
Then the screen goes black and BABYLON appears, at which point you can take a quick look at the clock: you realize that in five minutes a half hour has passed, the movie lasts one hundred and eighty.
La La Land written by James Ellroy
It seems to be facing the final film of a very long career, the colossal work of a seasoned auteur who has seen it all and done more: it is only the fourth film by a ‘young’ director barely 38 years old, who practically remakes La La Land as if James Ellroy had written it.
The tower of Babel wanted to reach the sky to enable men to talk to God, but God interrupted its construction with a stratagem: even Babylon seems to be able to go up, up, up forever, endlessly, in pursuit of the soundtrack of Justin Hurwitz, incessant pounding deflagrating shattering, and the feeling is that the film is intent on never ending. And perhaps it would continue animated with a life of its own, were it not for the intervention of the hand of the (god) director. That intervention comes in, it’s paracular and even recycled (Chazelle had already closed one of his films with a ride through film history, he did it with La La Land and signed an epilogue that was a masterpiece of a short film: however, that’s the point, remaking La La Land by reversing it) but at the same time it is fantastic, attractive, cheesy, tacky, and for that reason adorable.
An exaggerated, megalomaniacal delirium that believes it can encapsulate the entire history of cinema, from its origins to James Cameron’s Avatar. And he really believes it: that is why, despite his limitations, to want to hurt him is impossible.
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