1920s. The cinema finds its El Dorado. In Hollywood, anarchy, debauchery and excess accompany unbridled creativity, where women hold the top billing. The director plunges into this golden age of cinema, before sound, before the crash.
A hotheaded young actress (Margot Robbie), an alcoholic silent film star (Brad Pitt), a Latino handyman who knows how to seize his chance (Diego Calva)… In the ambitious Babylon, Damien Chazelle revisits the first decades of Hollywood through the rise and fall of several characters. Monumental, tragicomic, outrageous fresco, which plunges the spectator into the circles of Hollywood hell interspersed with drugs, alcohol, orgies, but also with glory and glitter. The inventiveness of the pioneers, the turpitudes of the stars, the madness and the tragedy of a young industry in full mutation with the arrival of talkies mingle there. Chazelle telescopes eras and references, in a maelstrom where fiction supplants reality. Immersed in this crazy period of nascent cinema where everything had to be invented.
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Like the good old days of the Wild West
In the dusty mountains of Simi Valley, a horde of ragged — and angry — extras pursue a director. Further on, on a set, an awkward actor impales himself on a pole, and a starlet dances on a saloon bar, in the middle of a setting in flames… Ordinary day in Hollywood. If he places the beginning of his film in the mid-1920s, it is rather the atmosphere and excess of the previous decade, that of the pioneers, that Damien Chazelle recreates, through an epic filming scene. Babylon reinvents this pivotal period when cinema, born on the East Coast, had just established itself in California, in what was still only a large village in the middle of orange groves.
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