Six years after the triumph of “La La Land”, Damien Chazelle plunges back into the history of cinema for a work of excess. “Babylon”, his fifth feature film, will be released this Wednesday, January 18 in theaters in France. This river and raw film, with Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, pays homage to the crazy freedom of the beginnings of Hollywood, before the arrival of talkies.
In the early days of filmmaking, Hollywood was a dream machine. Studios set up in Los Angeles, finding ideal climatic conditions and large spaces for pharaonic filming with hundreds of extras. Before the establishment of morality laws and prohibition, the producers organized lavish parties, where all the excesses – drugs, alcohol and sex – were allowed.
It is this excess that Damien Chazelle restores by staging a choral story around fictional characters: a superstar on the decline, played by Brad Pitt, meets an aspiring starlet, played by Margot Robbie, and a mexican handyman. These characters will rub shoulders with real Hollywood figures of the 1920s and 1930s, such as producer Irving Thalberg or press magnate Randolph Hearst. The director lays claim to the vulgarity and triviality of spectacular sequences, mirrors of a Hollywood considered a capital of vice, a Babylon, by the puritans of the time.
But no one is a prophet in his country. This thunderous, three-plus-hour declaration of love in early Hollywood, carried by a frenzied soundtrack, flopped upon its theatrical release in the United States.