In 1950, Billy Wilder created “Sunset Boulevard”, a venomous tragedy and a tirade about Hollywood eating its inhabitants, centered on a former star of silent cinema who was abandoned by the wayside. Two years after that, Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote the musical comedy “Singing in the Rain” as a kind of cheerful response to that film, in which a star who fails to make the transition to talking cinema is presented as a ridiculous character.
Seventy years later, Damian Chazelle, the man of “La La Land”, offers his own version of the rupture caused by the transition to sound in 1927, and it is paved with visual and audio references to the two aforementioned films. Like Wilder, Chazelle also strives for tragedy, but due to a flawed script and an aggressive cinematic style ( think Baz Luhrmann on Speeds) he fails to arouse emotional interest in the fate of the characters on the screen. And in the last act, as the film drags on past three hours, it becomes exhausting.
At the beginning of “Babylon” a caption appears on the screen announcing that the year is 1926, i.e. a year before the cinema began to talk and we are led, together with an elephant from Harban, to a celebration in Chanalit in the castle of a Hollywood producer. These kinds of wild celebrations are often an image of sinking empires, from Rome to Wall Street, and that’s the idea here as well. The 1920s, when people broke free from the traditions of the Victorian era and started partying, was dubbed the Jazz Age, although the film seems to exaggerate everything for effect. The elephant that shits on a poor man’s head is just the prelude to a film full of disgusting secretions of all kinds – a gross image of degeneration and destruction – and various symbolic animals. Later we will also get a poisonous snake, which apparently escaped from the Garden of Eden, in a particularly gruesome scene.
At the party, on the sidelines of which a well-known event from 1921 takes place (the death of the beginning actress Virginia Rapp following a drug-fueled sex/rape in the company of the comedian Roscoe Arbuckle) we get to know the five heroes of the film. I wrote that the film has five protagonists (plus a veteran gossiper who reports on their exploits) according to the characters that appear on the poster, but Chazelle is only really interested in three of them. It seems that he threw the other characters on the screen mainly for PC animation of the type accepted today.
Despite the film’s length, we learn very little about the black jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Juban Edfo), who is mostly seen playing here and there. His only dramatic scene is the one where he has to darken his face with charcoal black because his skin looks too light in the spotlight. The ironic indication of racism through blackface of a black man is the only justification for Palmer’s presence in the film. Also the role of the lesbian Chinese singer Fei Zhu (Lee Jun Li) is hardly developed beyond a nimble collage of pieces derived from the historical and cinematic characters of Anna Mei Wong and Marlene Dietrich.
The one who gets an entrance piece is Margot Robbie as Nellie LeRoy, who declares herself a star before appearing in a single film. Ruby, who is a bit of an actress, is without a doubt the best thing in the film, and in her scenes “Babylon” comes to real life. Next to her, Brad Pitt, whose lips are covered with a thin pump a la John Gilbert, is no better than Jack Conrad, the biggest star of MGM studios, who changes wives like socks and doesn’t know that his days as a star are numbered. Between the two is Manuel Torres (Diego Calaba), a junior production assistant who aspires to greater things.
The characters of the three, as well as all the other people in the film who get to say a sentence or two, were inspired by historical figures as well as classic movie clips, with varying levels of fidelity to the original. For example, when the drunken Conrad falls from the balcony into the pool, this is a hint of his future fall and also a quote from “Sunset Boulevard”, which opens with the corpse of a screenwriter lying in a pool.
The day after the same party surrounded by sex, drugs and jazz that opens the film, we go out to the field, to the sets of several films being filmed at the same time. Although at the beginning it is announced, as mentioned, that the film takes place in 1926, the way the production of the silent films is presented side by side corresponds to the work style of the previous decade, before the establishment of the major studios. The thunderous and deliberately anachronistic soundtrack composed by Justin Horowitz suggests that the mess is intentional, but for me it created a sense of lack of focus that also detracts from the film’s drama. The soundtrack is completely silent in a nice scene where Nelly enters the cinema to watch her first film, but this is a falsification of history in order to pay tribute to “living Godard’s life” – in reality, silent films were always accompanied by live music and the experience of watching them was not silent.
And so Chazel throws more and more references on the screen, and repeatedly cuts between the stories of the different characters, and adds more characters with the names of real people (like Max Minghella in the role of producer Irving Thelberg who occasionally passes by on the screen), until the feeling of everything is everywhere at once takes over the film that runs away from its maker.
Amidst this big-budget chaos there are some good scenes depicting different types of film shoots, and Margot Robbie is devastating as Nellie who asks if the director wants a tear or two. But then “The Jazz Singer”, the singing and somewhat talking film of Warner Studios, comes out and the celebration is over. Inspired by the wonderfully entertaining sequence from “Singing in the Rain” where the initial attempts to shoot a talking film are described, “Babylon” offers a distressing version of the same narrative and this is the beginning of the downfall of Nelly, who had become an overnight star only a year before.
Except that she is not responsible for the difficulties on the set, and the film does not make it clear in a convincing way why she is unable to make the transition to the voice (by the way, in reality the director who directed Clara Bow’s first talking film, in which Nellie was built on her character, was Dorothy Arzner, who invented the boom to help the struggling star , and it’s a shame that this piece of history is not represented in the film). Later, the scene in which she arrives at a festive event at the home of the press magnate William Randolph Hearst and his lover, the movie star Marion Davis, is particularly badly written and staged (touching on the issue of sexual harassment specifically through Hearst and his partner of years is bullshit).
It seems that Chazelle, who abused his hero in his first film “Whiplash” as well, does not like his characters. This time his love for cinema also seems more demonstrative than authentic. Among the references, which if I counted them all the review would be as long as the length of the film, is the indication “I love you, I love you, I love you”, which was lifted from the above sequence from “Singing in the Rain”. Here it is put in the mouth of Jack Conrad , in the scene from the first desert movie that provokes the laughter of the viewers, then repeats in Spanish “Te amo, te amo, te amo” in Manuel’s mouth. It seems that Chazelle wanted to rescue the well-known phrase from the ridiculousness, which is a nice idea in itself, but it drowns in the general commotion. The parting scenes of the main characters are staged in the most predictable and ineffective way and this is the last nail in the film’s failed attempt to be accepted as a tragedy.
In the epilogue, Chazelle sits down one of the protagonists to watch a very long montage of films (yes, like at the end of “Cinema Paradiso”), starting with “Song Ashir in the Rain” and continuing with segments from a multitude of films like it that presented technological and stylistic innovations from the beginning of cinema to 2022. The scene itself is A reference to the final chord of “The Crowd” from 1928, one of the last great silent films. But what presents itself as a love letter to the art of cinema is also experienced as empty greed. “Babylon” is about a world that fascinates me, and I really wanted to love it. That’s why I’m so sorry.
3 stars
Babylon directed by: Damian Chazelle. With Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Caleb, Gene Smart. USA 2022, 189 min.