Von Natalie Brunner
With his new film “Babylon”, Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle creates an epic by weaving well-known anecdotes from the early years of Hollywood into a narrative that revolves around four characters. They are all exploited in different ways by the studio system and the bosses and ultimately break at the dream factory. But before that there is a lot of intoxication and excess.
Paramount
“Babylon” begins with an incredible party scene, a cocaine-laced orgy, staged in a visually stunning way. In one of the booths, an underage actress collapses while having sex with a member of the executive floor. She is disposed of through the back door – a scene very reminiscent of the real-life rape and murder of up-and-coming actress Virginia Rappe in 1921. Although this is not elaborated on, it makes it clear that in the coming hours we will be moving on terrain where morality is an elastic and freely interpretable concept, and that we will be dealing less with a historical portrait of mores and more with an analogy to the present have to do.
Brad Pitt navigates unimpressed as a slippery but empathetic dandy and silent film superstar through this hustle and bustle. The film centers on Margot Robbie in the role of Nellie LaRoy, a maniacal young woman obsessed with trying to convince the rest of the world that she’s a star. This character’s energy is contagious and sweeps viewers into a whirlwind of success, cocaine and gambling addiction.
Paramount
“Babylon” is a frantic melodrama that attempts to tell the story of Hollywood and its victims in a way that gives the invisible minorities their place. Diego Calva plays Mexican-born Manny Torres, who works his way up from assistant who literally gets a shit on his head to studio manager. He begins to adopt the racist structures of the dream factory in order to be able to rise and survive in the system. Jovan Adepo plays Sidney Palmer, a brilliant African-American jazz trumpeter who, thanks to Manny’s initiative, has also appeared in the talkie. It is Manny, in turn, who exposes Sidney to racist “blackface” humiliation.
“Babylon” was given the subtitle “Intoxication of Ecstasy” by the German distributor. It’s a gigantomania rush, but also a severe hangover, complete with blood, puke, semen and shit. The film is a three-hour, ambivalent declaration of hate and love that never tires of showing who had to pay dearly for all the glamorous fun.