“Babylon”: Damien Chazelle recounts Hollywood’s golden age of the 1920s, on the trashy side

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are the star couple of the new film by the director of “La La Land” and “Whiplash”. A sumptuous dive into the heart of the Roaring Twenties in the Mecca of cinema.

Cinema and music are the common thread in Damien Chazelle’s films. Whiplash and La La Land reflect his musical fiber, Babylon, his love of cinema. But the two are always linked, as in this seamless reconstruction of 1920s Hollywood, with its dazzling direction, and where the American director gives one of his best roles to Brad Pitt. Released in theaters: Wednesday, January 18.

The Roaring Twenties
In 1926, in Los Angeles, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is the star of Vitaphone, a Hollywood major. For her part, like many other young women, Nelly LeRoy (Margot Robbie) arrives in the City of Angels, attracted by the lure of the cinema, sure of herself. Between orgiastic parties, where sex, drugs and mafia are mixed, and shootings, the meeting of the king of the screen with the starlet is inevitable, at the moment when the cinema passes from silent to talking.

Greatness and decadence of Hollywood! Damien Chazelle films the apogee of a libertarian era whose nature lies in the sobriquet “Roaring Twenties” that suits it so well. Their madness takes on incredible proportions, which the director Kenneth Anger had revealed in Hollywood Babylon, his 1959 book on the scandalous antics of the Mecca of cinema, at the heart of the film.

The underworld
With this third feature film, Damien Chazelle seems to complete one of his ambitions as a filmmaker. Like Fincher, Anderson or Mendes… Chazelle knows his history of cinema and knows where he comes from. What counts is where he is going. He surprises again with Babylon, by lifting the veil on the dark side of the Hollywood legend. Babylon is the anti-The Artist of the same era. The director is not stingy with explicit scenes of debauchery, with a constant scatological thread, on which the film opens with a memorable elephant. A more glamorous humor runs through the whole film.

Adept of the sequence shot, Damien Chazelle choreographs his actors and his camera with virtuosity. Are you a show-off? No, he sticks to the skin of his subject, where everything is effervescent to burst into pieces. Babylon describes the end of one era and the beginning of another. The film brings to light the underworld of Hollywood, until a hallucinating scene where we dive into a bottomless pit worthy of Dante’s infernal circles. Clearly in two parts, it deals with the drama that the arrival of talking pictures brought to the actors, sometimes to the point of tragedy. More than one star found himself unemployed, others fell into misery or committed suicide. This will not be the case for Damien Chazelle who, at 37, demonstrates once again the maturity and virtuosity of his cinema, with many years ahead of him.

The file
Genre : Drama
Director : Damien Chazelle
Cast: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P. J. Byrne, Lukas Hass
Running time: 3:09
Release date: January 18, 2023
Distributor : Paramount Pictures France

Warning : some scenes, words or images may offend viewers’ sensibilities

Synopsis: Los Angeles in the 1920s. A tale of overweening ambition and wild excess, Babylon traces the rise and fall of various characters during the creation of Hollywood, an era of unbridled decadence and depravity.

Sam Allcock

Sam Allcock is the founder of PR Fire. He helps small to medium-sized businesses land coverage in publications like BuzzFeed, Metro, The Huffington Post, and The Telegraph through smart press release distribution.