The pandemic dealt a severe blow to cinema on the big screen, and although we now have those days of 2020 more or less forgotten, movie releases were postponed, theaters closed and the prospect of re-entering them seemed, for a moment , something tangible and real. ‘Babylon’, from premiere on the 20th, it is not the first, nor will it be the last, of the films about the film industry and the power of this to generate dreams that appear in recent years, but it is the most resounding.
A year before the catastrophe, Quentin Tarantino It began with the revisionist trend that predicted the death of cinema as we knew it. ‘Once upon a time… in Hollywood’ (2019) was a nostalgic and realistic artifact that came to tell us that cinema is no longer what it was, nor does it have any sign of being again, but if that only took Marvel and the circumstance of the cinema-event on the industry, those that have arrived in recent years use that same sentiment as a way to justify an early autobiography.
Of Alfonso Cuarón, to Spielberg, through Paul Thomas Anderson, Sam Mendes or Kenneth Branagh, it seems that all the great directors of today owed us a reflection on the power of cinema to perhaps remind us that the power of the seat is capable of moving illusions and wills, almost like a constant announcement of “I’m going to the movies” ironically shown only in the passes of those who have already decided to checkout. There are something of elegy in these attempts that smell of despair and melancholybut perhaps the key was in telling why the cinema is still standing, year ago year.
A wild black comedy
The answer lies in telling how the medium changes, and along the way, perhaps also telling us the story of those who are carried by the medium. The good thing is that rarely projects as ambitious as ‘Babylon’ manage to be so much fun. Here Damien Chazelle works a prodigy of editing to recount, once again, the cruel price of the dream factory, through an archetypal example of “hollyweird“epic, wild, sensual and sad.
A film that simultaneously serves as a kind of prequel to ‘La La Land’ — Justin Hurwitz’s score notes seem like sister variations from another era — and Tarantino’s latest film, with which he not only shares stars, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbiebut that some scenes of each one are mirror reflections of the past of that one, with Nellye LaRoy visiting the cinema to see her own movieor Pitt’s Jack Conrad driving around LA, even slipping into the role of Rick Dalton himself.
The three-hour format takes the scale of an ‘Ave César’ (2016) towards a ‘Casino’ (1995) by Scorsese, only instead of telling the story of a game room, it breaks down the process by which Hollywood became devours itself with the arrival of sound, a theme that cannot be more Chazelle, whose filmography always has music as a compass somehow, even in the script for ‘Grand Piano’, building a rare coherence in all the themes of his work. However, here it goes to a new level.
dream crusher machine
If you have told us before about the sacrifices that excellence requires, the director limited himself to what it costs to enter the first division, and here he tells us about the difficulties, falls and descents that already take place inside, with which his usual discourse ends up expanding to tell how cinema always reinvents itself, leaving behind its creators, like a great wheel in which even those who arrive recently can easily end up in the back wagon, using new technologies as fuel. and the difficulty of entering them. The sequence of endless takes reflects the frustration of the filmmakers in a tragicomic way.
On the other hand, Chazelle once again shows the dispensable role of personal desires in the face of spectacle and artoblivion in the face of immortality, the value of celluloid as memory and the impossibility of keeping up with the capricious design of the public and trends, in a stupendous monologue by Jean Smart to Brad Pitt that really contends, with a star in inexorable decline such as the actor from ‘Seven’. It’s just one of the memorable scenes in ‘Babylon,’ from the sunset shoot to the fight with the snake.
All the themes end up turning into a controversial epilogue that gives meaning to the entire film, a meta-celebration of cinema as art, technology as the necessary evil to make it bigger or keep it alive. All with a melancholic look that also tastes like a farewell, but that helps to understand the dimension of the ideas of the director’s entire filmography, being something small and being part of something bigger is worth it. Although the entire plot of Sydney Palmer wants to tell us, for the first time, that not everything goes.
An LA Gothic with a bleak ending
There wouldn’t be much to add about the actors by saying that a crazy Brad Pitt ensures a great movie, but Margot Robbie is so seedy and imperial, and Tobey Maguire’s surprise giving terror will be the most unforgettable moment in cinema in 2023. Of course, the most memorable part is that opening half-hour sequence that would delight Kenneth Anger and his connoisseursgiving everything that the title promises, an orgy of sex, anecdotes, sapphic celebration and impropriety, with all kinds of substances through.
For lovers of movies about Los Angeles, ‘Babylon’ is reserved uA decadent, dark, and even disturbing third act. His almost literal descent into Dante’s circles of hell is depressing, dirty, bizarre, and even nods to LA Gothic maestro David Lynch. They’re not dreamlike like’Like Plague of Locusts‘ (The Day of The Locust, 1975) or as unfathomable as ‘Inland Empire‘ (2007), but shares his drawing of a seedy LA that engulfs its inhabitants, as well as that of ‘The Black Dahlia‘ (2006), or more recent ones like ‘Penny Dreadful: City of Angels’.
‘Babylon’ moves between genres, from noir to wacky comedy, but ultimately leaves a bitter aftertaste, a journey that never ceases to be brainless and surprising from a traditionally more corseted director, but who manages to tell a lot without lecturing , with an acid look at the lack of control that does not look the other way at its consequences, a treatise on broken dreams and long-term vision that stands as the first great film of 2023.