2022 ( USA ) ( Comedy, Drama, History )
Starring: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Jean Smart
Director: Damien Chazelle
Damien Chazelle creates a warts-and-all portrait of late-1920s Hollywood in his star-studded film. This film is set in the early days of cinema, when talking pictures were a jaw-dropping phenomenon and Hollywood was still being created. Babylon is decorated with orgies, elephant faeces, cocaine, spanking, dancing, chairs tossed through windows, and that’s all in the first 15 minutes!
Babylon puts a bullet in the head of any notion that the film industry’s silent era was ever austere or quaint. This was a frontier time, where the art of cinema was built from the ground up with zero rules and very little restraint. It was a place where the soul-sick and hungry could reinvent themselves, but not without considerable personal cost.
Babylon is fascinating, engrossing, challenging, nasty, distorted and repulsive in equal measure. It is full of remarkable set pieces with richly drawn characters, music, dancing, drugs, sex, love and betrayal. Subtle it is not.
(3hr 9min)