the filmmaker Damien Chazelle He has spent years demonstrating a clear obsession with using the same guidelines in his films: the price to pay for our dreams can be too high and even cause what we so longed for to simply escape us. ‘Babylon’, her fourth feature film, is further proof of this.
‘Babylon’ is also a work that embraces excess to such an extent that it can end up saturating some viewers. Of course, it does so from the first moment with a vibrant start that works as a great letter of introduction at all levels for a film that will later not be afraid to change its tone and even its genre according to the needs of the moment. The result is a fascinating, exciting and wild workbut it is not difficult to understand that it has been a tremendous failure in theaters in the United States.
overwhelming
From the first moment it seems that Chazelle has had carte blanche to do whatever she wants in ‘Babylon’, either to accurately reflect the world of cinema during those difficult years of transition from silent to sound or simply to reflect each of the personal dramas of its protagonists. This makes it a film brimming with energy and ideas, which is both fun and contagious and has a remarkable ability to chill the viewer’s blood.
The funny thing is that the epilogue itself, perhaps the most debatable of the entire function, makes it clear that the main motivation behind ‘Babylon’ is to offer a particular love letter to the seventh art. A lot of things go into it, as the film itself demonstrates in the almost three hours before it, but it’s only then that this tendency to excess saturates me a bit.
It is true that before ‘Babylon’ did not stop being the story of the dizzying rise and the inevitable fall of its protagonists. Each for different reasons, but that ephemeral glory that Hollywood gives you it ends sooner or later and it is up to each one to know how to continue with your life or assume that your end has come.
There, Chazelle shows a great ability to go from effervescent fun to a tremendous downturn, even flirting at times with terror to illustrate even more clearly that descent into hell, evident in a personal capacity, but also very illustrative if we compare what is happening then with that vigorous start from ‘Babylon’.
everything that goes up ends up coming down
As in many Christopher Nolan movies, there’s a lot here about how being obsessed with something drives you to such an extent that it can lead to self-destruction. However, Chazelle uses it here to integrate it into the very mechanics of Hollywood, very given to elevating to glory those who offer what their executives want but also to leave anyone behind at the first opportunity. and that leads even when what seems like a funny joke ends up having tragic consequences.
One of the main consequences of this is that all the individual stories are needed to create a larger mosaic, which is what Chazelle is really interested in. It is clear that the central plot is that of the characters in Diego Calva and Margot Robbie -both very inspired, but the energy that she gives off as Nellie LaRoy has a unique charm-, but ‘Babylon’ would be lame without the others.
In fact, even the loss of fleeting appearances like those of Olivia Wilde either Samara Weaving It would also hurt a film that shines by portraying the state of the industry during those years and the harsh conversion that followed after the premiere of ‘The Jazz Singer’ and which would end up reaching its peak when the hays code came into full operation. For that, the general detail is more important than going into giving more entity to all the characters that appear there, since most of them are subject to the needs of the story of the protagonists at that moment.
And it is that the individual is also essential, which is why Chazelle has no problem putting the brakes on the dizzying pace that he exhibits in many moments when the human component has to come to the fore. This becomes especially evident during the last hour of the film, where she achieves some scenes with a force perhaps even greater than anything seen up to then despite being much slower. At this point, the last sequence shared by the characters of Brad Pitt and Jean Smart because of how direct and devastating it is with a simple conversation.
There Chazelle does not hide, since ‘Babylon’ is a film in which there is no room for the subtleHere everything is done in a big way, both physically and emotionally, and directly. Of course, the objective is not so much to stimulate or bother the viewer as to offer the excessive b-side of what the masterful artist already showed at the time ‘Singing under the rain’film mentioned here directly.
In short
‘Babylon’ is a film that brings both the public and its characters to euphoria and then reminds us that behind it is the director of ‘Whiplash’ and ‘La La Land’. It is also the portrait of a very specific era in the history of cinema, shamelessly celebrating the seventh art but also showing its most base side. everything fits herebeing an injustice that it has barely raised 14 million dollars in the United States when its budget ranges between 80 and 110 million according to the source consulted.