There’s something always disturbing about seeing Hollywood looking at itself in the mirror, as if the industry is taking on a wistful self-awareness, sensing the end of an era. In 2019, in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino, through the friendship between a second-class actor and his stuntman, filmed the end of a certain Hollywood.
Four years later, Babylon seems to maintain its twinning with Tarantino’s film: the same choral structure following three characters who try to find a place under the Californian sun, the same stars – Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt – at the head of the bill; choice to situate the plot at a tipping point: here, the end of the 1920s and the transition from silent to speaking, which will transform Los Angeles into a sprawling and hyperorganized juggernaut.
Babylon draws its energy from the frenzy of the electric period when Hollywood was a bohemian and decadent playground, a refuge for acrobats dividing their time between Dionysian parties and the messy shootings that seemed to prolong them. The title is undoubtedly inspired by Kenneth Anger’s sulphurous tale, Hollywood Babylone (1959, republished in 2013 by Tristam Editions), portrait of a capital of sin regenerating itself through sex scandals and devouring ambitions that retract in fatal fates.
Star on the decline
Damien Chazelle introduces his film with a huge orgy in the mansion of a studio executive where bodies sink into a bath of lust and narcotics. Babylon fits together the sequences like imposing tableaux crossed by Fellini parades. Each time, the same principle: the situation slowly rots, runs towards a hangover, gradually revealing its nightmarish underside.
In these underworlds stands out a cast of characters: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), star actor on the decline, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), rough-hewn starlet, and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), young Mexican dreamer – these last two are ready to do anything to climb the peaks. Just like the couple in La La Land (2016), Nellie and Manny only come together in the mutual recognition of their ambition.
In Chazelle, a character is individualized only by a cardinal affect which serves as its only psychological baggage: ambition. Opposite, the spectacle is a blind ogre that brings bodies to heel, devours them before spitting them out. The filmmaker observes the enjoyment of his characters only to better sanction it – one by one, they will be sacrificed.
There’s what the film believes it to be: a supremely free auteur gesture celebrating old Hollywood craftsmanship in the face of regressive blockbusters. And then what it really is: an epilogue filmed from an industry perspective, the work of a bogeyman announcing the end of recess.
