Last come in the filmography of Damien Chazelle (The Land, Whiplash, First Man), Babylon is the film event of the beginning of the year. Despite the start of a catastrophic US exploitation, the film plunges into European theatres and triggers an intense critical debate. The partners of the measure will be cold in the back by browsing Twitter micro-critics about Babylon, which are torn between ecstatic praises and all visceral hatred. So why is the last-born of the Franco-American Damien Chazelle so much jaser?
Non-standard
Chazelle's career began just a decade ago, with a student film with a mini-budget: Guy and Madeline we have Park Bench. Just five years later, he proposed Whiplash, a drama featuring J. K. Simmons and Miles Teller, winning prizes all over the world, including Sundance's grand-prix. This success allows Chazelle to multiply her budget by 10 for her next film, The Land, a musical that becomes a real phenomenon.
First Man, again with Ryan Gosling, went a little more unnoticed but introduced Chazelle to the big studio film, produced notably by Spielberg. An ascent he continues with Babylon, film of all superlatives: more than 80 million budget out of promotion, a total duration of more than three hours and a casting of stars including Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. And if that wasn't enough, Babylon This is a genealogy of Hollywood in the pivotal period from silent to speaking cinema. Chazelle therefore does not lack ambition for her Babylon…
Birth of collective hysteria
The first film studio to settle in Hollywood in 1911 was the Nestor Studio, during which Hollywood became the key point of the new American film production. In 1925 the MGM was born, the famous studio with a roaring lion, and gradually the artisanal camps where the films are turned turned into real superstructures attracting among them the greatest stars of the seventh art.
Babylon begins at that time, in the middle of the silent cinema boom. Manuel Torres, a man to do everything for the Kinoscope studio, finds himself in the middle of the desert surrounding Los Angeles in order to satisfy the umpteenth lubie of his employer: to take an elephant to a reception organized by the cinema's layings. He follows an absolutely hallucinating sequence of a party shared between sex, drunkenness, drugs and an absolute taste of the show: already meet our three main protagonists. One Brad Pitt camping Jack Conrad, an absolute star, a petticoat runner and rarely sober; Nellie LeRoy (Margot Robbie) in wannabe star absolutely determined to make his name in the cinema industry and Manuel Torres (Diego Calva, for his first great role) man to do everything hiding his Mexican origins and also wishing to integrate himself into the matrix of the seventh art.
Chazelle is directly his technical maestria, in long movements of cameras flying in this mansion transformed, for an evening, into a real Pandemonium of sex and drugs. Perfectly rhythmized by the music of Justin Hurwitz – rewarded at the Golden Globes 2023 – the festive sequences could have lasted a little longer than we would have complained about. This segment also runs without giving the spectator any respite, sometimes until he chokes under the stacking of planes shipped at a staggering speed.
And maybe that's where the biggest crack of Babylon. Chazelle, well aware of her excessive length (a excess, as we have seen, which will go through the entire film), seems constantly to fear losing the attention of her spectator, at the risk of being sometimes frustrating so much our eyes do not have time to detail the tingling of the thousand extras and the richness of the scenery.
The dirty Chazelle version
His cinema also offers, always in an excessive fashion, new themes and new film modes: craving, sex, deviant. And Chazelle immediately set the tone, letting her pachyderm defecate for a long time on her camera... Babylon will splash the spectator, the intera, shake him. Whether it is the crowd blessed by the sperm of a giant phallus straddled by a dwarf, the long slaps of Margot Robbie's vomiting to the disturbing sound design of a snake bite scene, the director exposes a good dose of dirty.
In parallel, he embraces for the first time a frontal sexuality – often drowned in a constant over-stimulation of the viewer's eye – and even some bloody effects that stain the walls. But let us be clear, if Chazelle's cinema has never been so unbridled, it does not become subversive either. We remain a thousand miles from a provocation of Lars Von Sort or Gaspar Noah, and, as well as doing, it would have been appreciated if he would have allowed more deronation on that side. A bizarre madness particularly visible in an underground sequence inside the « asshole » of Los Angeles, carried by a Tobey Maguire It's a little too hot. The crash slash freak show that he offers then remains largely under-exposed, lost in the shadow, and largely escapes Chazelle's flirting camera, leaving the spectator a certain sense of frustration...
This appetite for sedition (age) is not gratuitous and develops the twofold discourse surrounding the very artificial world of Hollywood cinema: on the one hand a high society dependent on a worldly good taste, overflowing with wealth, aristocrat and Puritan, and on the other a world of shady shade of prostitutes, swimming in drugs and bans. Chazelle perfectly depicts this galaxy apart, detached from all laws and where money can absolutely pay for everything: the disappearance of an actress sent into a coma by the sexual faces of a Hollywood magnate, extras killed by shovel, abject racist behavior...
A bicephaly all the more illustrated by the introduction of the Hays code from the 1930s (injection of moral codes inside Hollywood productions to escape surveillance and censorship), perhaps too quickly overcame in the feature film.
Abyssing
BabylonLike his previous films, he wants to be a rise and fall. Each of the characters follows a typical trajectory – sometimes even archetypal – of overwhelming success involving, necessarily, a brutal fall. The only one that comes out is the African-American trumpeter Sidney Palmer (incarnate by Jovan Adepo). Unlike other characters, he no longer accepts the systematic grinding imposed by the Hollywood machine and decides, on his own initiative, to leave his role as a star to go down to practice his art in small rooms.
A scene that Chazelle has in alternate editing with the funeral of the great star, which can only be interpreted as an abyss of the director's career. By scratching the system that produces its own film, it seems well aware that a quick return to a more human scale is necessary if it wants to last and flourish behind its camera...
A meta talk about his own career and an open critic of Hollywood cinema, this while being his direct product, he goes without saying that he joins Lana Wachowski and his Matrix Resurrections. Des cinéastes tirant à boulets rouges sur le système qui les produit, c’est peut-être le symptôme d’un mal caractérisé par l’effondrement du film du milieu. Qu’il s’agisse tout récemment de Trois mille ans à t’attendre de Miller ou West side story de Spielberg, le film à budget moyen ne parvient plus à exister au box-office et semble bel et bien condamné à disparaitre au profit des superproductions gargantuesques.
Babylon fustige d’ailleurs dans sa scène finale ces films cyniques. Ceux qui recyclent de l’ancien pour en rire ou en faire des succédanés publicitaires, comme toutes les dernières Marvelleries sorties récemment. Et de se clore, avec un Manuel Torres bouleversant, entrevoyant au travers des images de Chantons sous la pluie tout le cinéma de hier et de demain : de Méliès à Avatar, en passant par Matrix and Jurassic Park.
Là où certains décrivent un égo-trip insupportable de la part du cinéaste franco-américain, ne faudrait-il pas plutôt y voir une touchante déclaration d’amour au septième art dont il constate, comme nous, chaque jour l’effritement ? En tous cas, reste que les intenses débats qui entourent Babylon (certes non exempt de maladresses) prouvent bel et bien que le film stimule la discussion, et c’est une qualité indéniable que devront autant reconnaitre ses pourfendeurs que ses pires détracteurs.
[…] détailler le fourmillement de ses scènes et d’une volonté d’outrance parfois un peu tiède, Babylon reste une bonne surprise de ce début d’année centrée sur la fabrication du […]