NOf course, every cinema connoisseur knows that you have to find films like “Jeanne Dielman” or “Triangle of Sadness” important. Unfortunately, these are bores without carnage, massive explosions, and nude scenes with no greater purpose than showing nudity.
Maybe that’s why the cinema isn’t doing really well anymore. Why should you spend a lot of money on popcorn and hook up with people you don’t know for something you can do with a cell phone? You don’t need Dolby Surround for capitalism analysis and profundity.
Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago. Back then, directors were still allowed to tell the craziest stories, chase crowds through the desert or rebuild Babylon, if they happened to think of it. And the actors didn’t have to learn lines, but could concentrate on their core competencies: looking good, holding facial expressions in front of the camera, crying, flashing.
Outside of work, they strayed with impunity, with no one to take care of them and credit them with philanthropic efforts. At least that’s how it’s supposed to have been when Hollywood was still a real dream factory. It’s really a shame that it doesn’t exist anymore.
That’s what Damien Chazelle thought. And filmed a spectacle that lets the pig out for three hours, with every shot you notice how much money, bodily fluids and desire to shock were mobilized.
“Babylon” tells, if you want to call it a story, about the years in which Hollywood was a Berghain that was constantly running at full speed, in which films were made more on the side.
Fight with rattlesnakes
Escaped provincial wannabes who want to be stars; Legends in silly costumes. convicts beating each other with swords; Women who walk into a bar and flatten ten men just with their looks. Drivers transporting leaky elephants and disposing of corpses.
Parties where midgets are tossed, champagne bottles are sunk down unintended orifices, and golden showers are pouring down. If that gets boring, people head out into the wilderness to fight a rattlesnake.
The plot is not worth mentioning: three people – played by Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt and Diego Calva – try to assert themselves in Hollywood, have a lot of experiences and come out as losers. “Babylon” is basically just there to celebrate excess.
And action: Diego Calva and Brad Pitt in “Babylon”
Quelle: Scott Garfield/© 2022 Paramount Pictures
.And to mourn that he eventually had the plug pulled – too vulgar, too immoral, far too expensive. Talkies also became fashionable: even the most jittery and coked-up actors had to stand still on their markers, sound engineers took over, newcomers from the country needed language and manners training.
Stars who had never verbally abused anyone because their face was enough now had to say “I love you” and sounded so embarrassed that their faces stopped moving.
“Babylon” is such a film: a series of observations, effects, vignettes and punchlines that want to show how immensely much cinema has lost through restraint and sophistication. It’s a ruthless machine that chokes people out when they’re no longer accessible to audiences, but one that never fails to produce magic.
Something, as Brad Pitt once said, that the gas station attendant wants to see – unlike the Ibsen shit that the theater jerks who came with the talkies imagine. But he doesn’t end well either, because at some point the gas station attendant and his wife don’t want to see him anymore, even though he’s been creating magic for so long. Everything has its time, and at some point not anymore.
“Babylon” did not do as hoped at the American box office. That’s not a big surprise. After all, farewells can only be sung, tears of mourning only shed, when what they are meant for no longer exists. And the people out there are indeed as heartless as “Babylon” states. They want less to look into a past, where parties were more lavish than they will ever experience, than to be gifted something that will help them through the present a little.
The actress played by Margot Robbie was once asked if she could cry, and she replies, “No problem. A tear or two?” For old Hollywood, one would have sufficed, Damien Chazelle chose to shed a few hectolitres. The silent close-up, however, of it pouring out of Robbie’s eye is pure magic.