Damien Chazelle is a filmmaker obsessed with limits, or rather, limits are the only theme in his films.
In Whiplash (2014), the musician breaks his head to pursue the limits of beat and speed because only by pushing this limit can he achieve lightness; La La Land (2016) restores the glamour of musical films in Hollywood's Golden Age, but the extreme life and dream still tear apart, even if the exaggerating sweetness manages to wrap the bitter story in fantasy; First Man (2018) tells a household breaking-through story, so it turns to discover the narrow details behind the grand narrative. As a succession of consistent themes, the birth of Babylon (2022) is no longer surprising.
This magnum opus about the end of the silent era in Hollywood swings wildly - if it succeeds, it will become a new legend in cinema history; if it fails, it will probably be like Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) or Francis Coppola's One from the Heart (1981), which, in the name of courage and irreverence, cost themselves and investors' fortune.
![Babylon](https://img.peliplat.com/api/resize/v1?imagePath=peliplat/article/20230223/85e28c7199a6f0899714054554bb0f6e.png&source=s3-peliplat)
Babylon
This gambling counters Chazelle's lack of restraint, which in turn illustrates the limits to what Chazelle is obsessed with, not the limits of dreams, but the limits of success. In his works, success and failure never reconciled, much less a middle ground. While success is presented on the screen in its sweetest and most spontaneous form, failure is full of fury and filth.
" Successology" is perhaps the best way to describe Chazelle's universe. While the mundane notion of the joy and sorrow of success and failure brings the audience a sense of straightforwardness and fantasy, this successology stops the film at a superficial level when it wants to discuss deeply.
The fatal failure of Babylon is not so much its unrestrained scenes of the glitz and glamour of pre-Hays Code Hollywood, as it attempts to reduce this complex changing period in cinema to a simple struggle between success and failure, masking this hollowness with madness and chaos.
By the film's opening half hour, the unrestrained party scene has gotten out of hand, totally losing Chazelle's proud sense of pacing and leaving only a few clichés about what a greater life is, told in an intoxication of alcohol and drugs, that sow the dangerous seeds for the whole film.
The story of Babylon is based on the lives of several key figures in the history of Hollywood silent cinema, although the film's style is more of a gossip fest, as the title might be taken from the avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's infamous book Hollywood Babylon - a scandalous history of Hollywood's notorious stars. And, of course, a reference to the ancient Babylon scene in D.W. Griffith's silent masterpiece Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916).
![Hollywood Babylon](https://img.peliplat.com/api/resize/v1?imagePath=peliplat/article/20230223/ccf3572884d044bbd02c3cf90a2c2db6.png&source=s3-peliplat)
Based on the book, Hollywood Babylon (1971) covers both real and rumored scandals.
Like the myths of untraceable antiquity, Hollywood's history becomes a text for future generations to draw on. Chazelle connects the past with the future of cinema through references to classic film sequences. Thus the late 1920s and early 1930s of this 2020s screen are simultaneously enveloped by visions from the past and the future.
Brad Pitt plays the prototypical washed-up star Jack Conrad, a flamboyant superstar of the silent era, John Gilbert, who worked with Greta Garbo on Queen Christina (1933), who was devastated by the unpopularity of his voice after the arrival of the talkies and passed away early in alcoholism and illness.
In the opening scene of Babylon, after a hungover 'speech' about the future of cinema, Jack accidentally falls from his mansion and is seen floating, back-first, in the private swimming pool downstairs, as if in a flash, during that legendary opening shot of Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd (1950). -Although Brad Pitt shakes his head off and climbs out of the pool, those who have seen Wilder's film will know that this means what we are about to see is a story told by a dead man. Unfortunately, in the endless vomit, these brilliant touches of close integration are short-lived.
Like Singin' in the Rain (1952) and Sunset Blvd., which reflected on the silent film era in the 1950s, or A Star is Born (1954), which reflected the Hollywood star system, Babylon pays homage to people who were unfortunately eliminated amid the current of the times, but Babylon is almost exclusively associated with every cliché but film.
The advent of 'talkies' seems only to act like a cultural phenomenon here, providing plot points for the characters to rise or fall, and as for the real thinking through sound, music, and dance, as in Singin' in the Rain, is naturally absent.
Chazelle expressed no insights of his own into the art of cinema in a new era; all he had were pseudo-emotional guff, and even less likely to have the personal perspective Quentin Tarantino showed in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019).
![Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood](https://img.peliplat.com/api/resize/v1?imagePath=peliplat/article/20230223/4709a97df48fb0fc933f950a5faf1e6c.png&source=s3-peliplat)
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
The best successor to Chazelle's previous films is Nellie (by Margot Robbie) - a dreamer from an ordinary background who goes it alone, based on Clara Bow, one of the most popular actresses at the end of the silent film era.
In 1927, Paramount bought gossip writer Elinor Glyn's short story 'It' for a high price and made it into the film It (1927), which tells the story of a saleswoman of modest means who climbs the social ladder using her beauty and charm. The so-called 'It' in both the novel and the film was a euphemism for sex appeal and a concept that Glyn marketed in her tabloid authorial style, just as the novel's heroine marketing herself to high society.
The gossipy journalist Elinor (by Jean Smart) in Babylon is Elinor Glyn personified, and Chazelle's understanding of the film business seems to be solely about marketing. Chazelle sells Success in all his films, and the evolution of cinema history reduced to a PR game full of advertising words.
The film is not lacking in moments of believing in dreams, and only in those moments does Chazelle maximize the sense of motion in his previous works: the scenes depicting crazy movie sets in the first hour of the film are vibrant. As grand as those of Erich von Stroheim's monument. (possibly the prototype of the loud German director by Spike Jonze). However, while Stroheim always maintained his aristocratic condescension in the grandness of the madness, Chazelle only resorts to adrenaline to save the day.
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Spike Jonze inBabylon
Yes, Hollywood is a place of impurity, so what was it that made that golden age so great and contradictory? He tries feebly to repeat the sequences of Singin' in the Rain, just so that the film's protagonist can sit in a cinema thirty years later and watch Gene Kelly dance and be moved by himself as if the film were telling his story.
The real emotional climax in the film comes from a bizarre time travel. Having a post-apocalyptic work travel back in time to forcibly sublimate nostalgia - an opportunistic speculation that means Chazelle has completely lost sight of what exactly makes a film a masterpiece.
From Eadweard Muybridge to Jean-Luc Godard to James Cameron, a torrent of so-called 'cinematic history' flows quickly through the end of the film, with all sorts of bits and pieces dissolving into nothingness in a grinder-like jumble of cuts. If cinema will eventually die, it would not be the smartest thing for Chazelle to assume anything is nothing.
Débora H. Garrido
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