What is Babylon? Is it Kubrick, is it Fellini, is it Baz Luhrmann? No. It’s Miles Davis, it’s Tom Waits, it’s Jimmy Page. It’s Damien Chazelle who makes movies. It is the film of a musician who has been given the talent of knowing how to play an instrument like the camera.
– Chazelle he is a director that I particularly appreciate, it will be for his shooting style but above all it will be for his visceral relationship with music, which I avoided until my personal viewing of the film to read any kind of criticism or review about it. I simply didn’t want to have any kind of expectations and have completely blank eyes, ears and brains in front of the young director’s most expensive and ambitious production. I had seen the trailer, I knew the themes and the setting, I overheard the comment of some passionate friend but nothing more. After leaving the cinema, after reading a few reviews as I always do, I give myself a pat on the back to compliment the choice. After reading DETERMINATE reviews by pseudo-critics who get by by building a character to the bad chef from Masterchef, I’ll give myself another one to have the ability to appreciate and get excited in front of a 3-hour behemoth like this and perhaps I am a little saddened by the evidently sad and sad life of certain individuals. In the first bars of the film we hear a very important phrase to better approach Babylon: “movies make you escape“. Inserted between long shots and roundups of parties based on drugs, sex and circus subjects to represent the incredible glitz and frenzy of the Hollywood industry of the time that so many longed for, it is actually the first key necessary to at least try to appreciate and understand Babylon. You have to agree to escape with him, you have to get carried away and when the train derails instead of starting to rail against the train conductor for his wicked choices you simply have to accept your fate with curiosity and desire to get involved. And you have to leave aside the preconceptions according to which the train will crash and explode due to the force of gravity, because maybe between a blue tablet and a red one it happens that the train simply changes shape;
– The shape, just that shape that Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) investigates its evolutionary process, and that Babylon is jagged and dim. To decipher this second point, I use another sentence taken directly from the film: “all artists aspire to music“. The 189 minutes of film revolve around the careers and lives of different characters, around the voracious and frenetic California film industry, around the incredible successes and sensational downfalls of every single character present. If as a spectator you approach the film by completely removing the audio, I would think that it is simply a film that “pays homage”, “criticizes”, “satires” Hollywood and its paradoxes with various famous cinematographic references and quotations (we all say hello to Federico da Rimini). of Babylon, and I get involved as I suggested before, I understand that the first sense with which I have to receive Babylon are not the eyes but the ears. The element that most communicates, tells and speaks throughout the film is the sound, from the jazz bands that occupy the environment to the silences destroyed by the violent sounds of the scene. It is important to understand that the form of Babylon is not mainly visual but sound. All of this is obviously strengthened and exaggerated to the nth degree by the great central turning point of the film which is, obviously, the decline of silent cinema in favor of sound cinema. Babylon is therefore a film that pays homage to cinema? No, Babylon is a film that pays homage to sound dimension and form, whether cinematic or purely musical;
– A multifaceted dimension that communicates with a very careful attention to detail, especially in the vocal performances of the characters we know. From the director who screams and incites Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) almost as a motivator to make her perform at her best on set, but who we then see transform into a silent gesticulator, to the actors themselves who change their speech with the arrival of sound, both on stage and in public, up to the paradox of Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) who as a jazz trumpeter is forced to change his image in front of the cameras, putting the color of his skin in front of his musical qualities. “Everything is going to change” that’s what we hear and that’s what actually happens, with a total reversal of all the plans we were used to during the first part of the film and which are called into question in the second part. All helped by entering the various sets of microphones and sound operators ready to overturn the course of cinema.In the spoken evolution of the characters we also find one of the many criticisms that Chazelle has disseminated along his film to the cinema and its change: from the contradictions of Hollywood supported by the incessant hunt to politically correct up to the attempt to harness sound and music with industrialized and decidedly not very creative results, the second part of Babylon takes cameras and microphones into the darkest corners of Hollywood;
– If the backbone of Babylon is musical it doesn’t mean that the visual component is less important, on the contrary it is calibrated to further strengthen the sound dimension of the narration. Focusing on the first part of the film would be a bit easy, the feasts are clearly Fellinian and the references to the glorious past of cinema are never lacking, they are scenes of uncontrolled pomp whether we are at Harvey Weinste’s houseEHMDon Wallach whether we are on the set of the battle in the desert. The image obviously becomes more important and stronger in the second part, with the beginning of the sound control. Starting from the “Silence Please” signs spammed as much as I can, to the descent into hell with James McKay (Tobey Maguire) up to the 2001spaziale final chromatic and photographic journey it is in the second part that the machines become more involved and the eyes are put to the test more. Let me be clear, it doesn’t mean that in the first part the image is less satisfying – the sense of overwhelm and also of comedy is incredible and extreme to the maximum – it is simply in the darkest face of the film that Chazelle has set in motion a less flashy but more narrative. Emblematic in this piece is precisely Tobey Maguirephysically and visually taken to excess which takes us towards the baddest point of the second half, in which we also meet an Elephant Man (this time we say hello to David from Missoula) in chains;
– Throughout this cascade of events and physical and cerebral upheavals we find a large cast, in the sense that it costs money and in the sense that there are important names. Now, one of the most ferocious criticisms of Babylon is that the characters that populate the narrative are empty, gaunt, have little emotion. In the meantime, I think it is certainly necessary to recognize how all the actor’s performances are splendid and decidedly appreciable – Margot Robbie rules all sets and Brad Pitt is obviously an infallible old-school showman – but let’s ask ourselves a question. How important would characters thicker than those proposed by Babylon be? It is true, their construction is not excellent, in certain points more could have been done and more marked the hand, but in the end their stories are a plot that becomes strong in the union and I think that having more characterized characters would then have moved the focus of the film. It is a jazz film, a film with syncopated and free rhythms, and as in the rawest jazz, each member of the band is ready to attack and free his own personality within a shared and larger digression. Babylon talks about how beautiful it is to use your ears, it talks about Hollywood and old and modern cinema, it is neither a biopic nor a film with a real protagonist. Also for this reason, Babylon is a film that I deeply appreciated, that I am ready to see another 1000 times probably with an ever better sound system, a film and a film genre that is increasingly missing from the modern filmmaking strings and about which we hear always the need, especially when done with the audacity that brought us Chazelle.