BABYLON

  Dominic Chazelle’s new Babylon offers something more intense, wilder and more probing than we are used to. You could see it as a ferocious response to the threat of streaming devouring the movie business,

They start as they mean to go. In the peak days of the Hollywood silent film, an elephant defecates over its driver on its way to the Hills mansion where a passed out starlet is found with the naked fat man movie comic in a side room to the full blast orgy. The camera races through a hoard of fornicating, coked-up, naked party goers, with Margot Robbie flinging herself into the action in her scarlet body-baring outfit, backed by Jovan Adepo’s black jazz musicians. Eat your heart out Gaspar Noé or for that matter the best efforts of the porno industry.

Trying to keep a lid on all this is movie-struck Mexican gopher Diego Calva (Narcos), who falls in with superstar Brad Pitt, come through the excesses of the night raring to get on with the next day’s shooting, and motoring onto the location past picketing sign holders and side by side movie sets. This is a career best performance for Pitt. 

Robbie has been recruited there looking confused until, faced with the camera, she snaps into action, dominating the moment and generating her tears on cue. (Morris Elvey was proud of his ability to do that) Olivia Hamilton as the movie's composite of the era’s several woman directors, who all but vanished at that point, is sharp enough to go with this.

Pitt & Calva

Calva has to pull a gun on knife-wielding skid row extras and the breath-catching hundred riders charge smashes the cameras, leaving him to steal an ambulance to race a replacement to the scene before they lose the fading light and capture a vista of crowd activity behind Pitt’s big romantic moment - embrace against the last rays of the sun rimming hundreds of costumed extras and exploding pyrotechnics.  The three hour plus film has hardly started.

Babylon is an evolved kind of animal. It clearly wants to extend the on going self referencing history of the movies, invoking Gloria Swanson star of Sunset Boulevard, pivoting on Singing in the Rain, fronting the stars of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and ending, a bit anti-climactically, with a sustained classic images montage. Gianni Amelio’s compilation on the history of the Italian silent film for the Turin museum is better than that one.

Calva and Smart in hat.

Even without considering the content, Babylon is an extraordinary looking film.  Shot on thirty five millimeter film by Chazelle's regular cameraman Linus Sandgren, Babylon comes full of complex single take travellings and period tableaux. Jean Smart singled out her authenic recycled Erté-era fanned feather head piece among the fifteen hundred costumes Mary Zophres provided the film. Shots of charging warriors or vintage luxury cars running level with the camera pump up attention. I’d have had a buzz out of seeing a tinted twenties Paramount mountain on the front, if  the Wings restoration team hadn’t done that already. All this (include the final montage) must have strained the schedule and the budget.

Babylon centers on the late nineteen twenties arrival of sound, sidestepping the format of the familiar Star Is Borns in favor of a narrative coloured by the versions in the sixties Hollywood TV series from David Wolper, Kevin Brownlow and the BBC. 

Though "serious" critics are one of the few groups they don't find space for, this is one of the rare times that anyone probes the relationship between high art and movies, with Twelve Tone music, Bauhaus, Alexander Scriabin and Eugene O’Neil dropped into the dialogue and silent film star Brad Pitt turning on his theater actress current wife and extolling the movies that, from the Nickelodeons to the picture palaces, have enriched the lives of people who couldn’t afford her work - let alone understand it. This is something different to that line of putting up a competition between American popular entertainment and European art. For a more relevant comparison look at l998’s Leap of Faith with evangelist Steve Martin touting his tent show as offering the entertainment value of the up-market Broadway productions his hick town audience will never see.

We do get the film’s vivid representation of melting pot America - Calvo ”crossing the border at twelve”. There are effective hints of the Great Depression in the margin - a Forgotten Man with a “Will work” sign, murderous hobos or the run down homes the protagonists escape into their world of luxury. 

Li Jun Li

The leads are camouflaged versions of Clara Bow, John Gilbert and Bugsy Siegal, (along with that hint of Roscoe Arbuckle). Li Jun Li, their slinky-glamorous bisexual Anna Mae Wong character has been composited with her Shanghai Express co star Marlene Dietrich, getting to do Dietrich’s Morocco number. There’s no evidence to confirm that the personable Anna actually wrote intertitles for her films and was the only one around who knew how to handle being rattler bit but one of their nicest touches is a cut to Li acting as a star’s dialogue coach.  Similarly, being a Twenty First Century production, Adepo’s  black musician character (“I think you’re pointing the camera the wrong way”) gets developed in welcome depth. He is the one to survive the story's events with the least damage.

I recognise an urge like the one behind the Spielberg Ready Player One, a compulsion to explore the mechanism of movie enthusiasts. Babylon reacts against the fake euphoria of fandom and awards. Celebrities destroyed by excess are familiar but here we also get the scene of desperation as the characters adapt to the new disciplines of recording with sustained panic - Robbie repeatedly struggling with memorising her lines and missing the one mark that will accommodate the microphone, the tyranny of the sound man over-riding the director and lethal working conditions. Compare the similar footage in 1934's gentler It Happened in Hollywood.

Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons weren’t about yet, so Jean Smart’s gossip writer is near to called Adela Rogers St. John. Publicity assures us she is supposed to be Eleanor Glynn. People who they actually name - Garbo, Irving Thalberg, mainly represented by a business card - are largely off screen presences. Figures who coasted through that transition without the cloud of substance abuse - Ronald Coleman, Loretta Young, Wally Beery - don’t figure.

As substantial as the panoramas of excess, which book end the film, is once supremely confident Pitt’s despairing “why did they laugh?”, coming with Smart’s cockroaches monologue about the pictures that will linger for audiences who will be born and die after the filmmakers. “We’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.” The writing and the actress’ delivery of it should enshrine that next to “We had faces then” or "Film is truth 24 times a second." The argument is taken further when we get Singing in the Rain set dismissively against the incidents we have seen Calvo experience first hand. I never did like that one as much as the other Kelly-Donen musicals, a collection on which writer-director Dominic Sayre Chazelle clearly fixates. 

Damien Chazelle & Olivia Hamilton.

Coming from a family of academics and being a one time drummer,  Chazelle looks frighteningly youthful. He took the status of all time youngest recipient of the director Oscar from Norman Taurog.  He has snuck up on us. There was nothing in his First Man and Whiplash to suggest he’d become a major film maker and he has been lying dogo since the extra-ordinary success of  La La Land came complete with Oscar night live drama over its award - possibly Warren Beaty’s greatest performance. Chazelle’s pilot eps. for The Eddy don’t register but Babylon can’t be ignored. There’s very little that is as resonant and attention getting, even with some dodgy choices. Did we really need to see Clara Bow throw up over Marion Davies and William Randolph Hurst?

The film flirts with the past the footlights space in a way that most viewers may miss. There’s a Harvey Weinstein lookalike.  Spike Jonze figures in a bit part as a director and the movie’s producer Mark Platt plays a producer. The composite female director is performed nicely by Chazelle’s own wife.    

One good question is how those sustained take sequences of hedonistic excess, which book end the film, are going to effect it’s future, with shifts in taste and censorship (here represented only by one forlorn sign holder picketing the location gate).  Notice that Margot Robbie gets plenty physical but, just as in films like Dusan Makajevec's W.R.History of the Organism, the leads never go bare assed, leaving that to the extras. Robbie has mentioned that. While we see a stunt man impaled in the battle scene, I didn’t spot any dead horses either.

When the makers make such effort to get things right. It’s irritating to spot when they don’t. It’s particularly grating that their re-staging of the Hollywood Revue of 1929 chorus is done in the shades of orange of surviving faded copies and not the original two color Technicolor palette. One of the things that gave Scorsese’s Hugo its charge was seeing Meliés lobster men and fairies against their backgrounds in the full range of tones, not those of the inferior copies we’ve been looking at for so long.

Jovan Adepo's accompaniment - "The camera's pointing the wrong way"

Gentleman's Fate - Gilbert, Marie Prevost & Louis Wolheim 

 I’ve just read a review that repeats the Furphy of John Gilbert’s career destroyed by sabotaged films. Gilbert’s sound movies were in fact mounted with all the know how that a major studio could bring to them, like those of his peer group, Antonio Moreno, Ramon Novarro - and Buster Keaton. Gilbert wrote one, as he always wanted to, and the excellent Gentleman’s Fate was the proto-type for the mammoth Godfather franchise. The owners of  His Glorious Night, the Gilbert film, which supposedly provoked the audience laughter we see simulated here, keep that big part of the puzzle out of sight. I’ve always been curious about it. Gilbert’s fall was more plausibly brought about by insecurity and the inability of MGM to incorporate the Depression era changes of taste to which Zanuck at Warners had proved more alert. Babylon’s adding a God-is-not-mocked response brings a fresh dimension.  

 So far most of this is sailing past public and press. The returns in the 'States have been miserable and reviews often negative, an alarming response for what must be the most ambitious attempt yet to make sense of cinema as phenomenon, eclipsing written criticism, documentaries and previous dramatisations. Maybe people just don't care anymore. I'd find that scary.

Barrie Pattison - 2023.