Babylon

Directed by Damien Chazelle

Running time: 3hrs9 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Margot Robbie stars in Babylon

If the concept of ‘Hollywood’ is anything at all, it’s a love affair with success. Hollywood’s worst nightmare is failure. But failure is also part of the premise — built in, guaranteed  — because nobody stays on top forever.

Director Damien Chazelle’s lavish epic Babylon explores this idea from various perspectives across an epic runtime of over three hours. Set mostly during the late 1920s and starring Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo and Jean Smart as various Hollywood archetypes — starlet, matinee idol, wannabe producer, cabaret artist, musician, gossip columnist — the film is a jewel-encrusted, champagne-drenched, filth-spattered patchwork quilt of different stories, which have the feel of a series of entertaining anecdotes stitched together into a more-or-less cohesive tapestry. It’s all here: producers, suicides, alcoholism, affairs, overdoses, studios, drugs, actors. You can step back and marvel at it in stunning macrocosm, as a large-scale piece of work, or you can walk right up close and drink in the details of one single little sketch. Just don’t think too hard about why that particular sketch happens to be placed next to that other sketch or where such-and-such a storyline went in the end.

I came away from this film with a strong sense of ‘Ozymandias’ energy — this feeling that the film was more beautiful for being a bit broken, a ludicrous tumble-down monument that gains something from the fact that it’s collapsing here and there, rather than a perfect, impenetrable citadel. I don’t know whether this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers or if they were going for something totally slick and didn’t get there, but “look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” wouldn’t make a bad Babylon tagline. If cinemas cease to exist fifty years from now, any historians picking their way through the ruins could do worse than have a look at this prophetic, self-reflexive eulogy. Apart from anything else, it’s frequently very funny.

Babylon concludes entertainingly but not fully successfully, with a striking sequence apparently demonstrating the potentially transporting effect of cinema not so much as art but as artifice. As the film’s primary interest up to that point has been a slightly ambivalent deconstruction of said artifice, I’m not sure it’s fully possible for this to land. It’s as if a three-hour show dedicated to creating a distance between audience and magician, by revealing how a magician’s tricks are performed, suddenly expects your jaw to hit the floor when you see a rabbit pulled out of a hat. Perhaps it could work if it was the most remarkable rabbit you’ve ever seen in your life — I certainly have nothing against rabbits in principle — but this particular bunny has the misfortune of following hard on the heels of a truly wild and wonderful trip down a rabbit hole.

Never mind.

It is possible for a small village to be perfect; miniatures have less in them to go wrong. Not so a city, whose grand scale prevents this; there is simply too much there for perfection to be a possibility. Babylon is a city, and one that demands you take a trip there as soon as possible.

BABYLON (2022) Written by Damien Chazelle| Shot by Linus Sandgren | Edited by Tom Cross