Babylon ★★★★
STEVEN Spielberg and Sam Mendes have chosen to romanticise the cinema experience in their recent, conventional works The Fabelmans and Empire of Light.
Both films are very good, but their younger colleague Damien Chazelle tops them both with the force of nature that is Babylon.
Yes, it’s rambling and erratic at times; but I didn’t take my eyes from the screen for the three hours of cinema overload.
The director of La La land, Whiplash and First Man throws literally everything at his audience in this part dramatic and part comic look at the transition of cinema from the silent to talkie eras.
We start with an elephant being transported along a dusty rural road in a ramshackle horse trailer just outside Los Angeles in 1926.
The only way they get the animal up a hill is after it loses some weight defecating on one of the men transporting it.
It’s a not-so-subtle metaphor for getting to the top.
The elephant is part of the highlight of a massive and chaotic party being held at a mansion by a Hollywood mogul.
Everyone who’s anyone in Hollywood is there and they’re up to everything imaginable, from having people urinate on then to snorting cocaine and having sex in public.
It’s a no-holds barred vision of Hollywood excess that also introduces us to the five main characters whose changing fortunes we will follow for the next three hours.
Diego Calva plays Mexican immigrant Manny Torres whose start in movies is sparked by Brad Pitt’s star Jack Conrad needing a lift home in time to almost sober up before filming his latest epic.
Margot Robbie is brash would-be starlet Nellie LaRoy, newly arrived from New Jersey, while Li Jun Li is a sexy cabaret singer and favourite of the stars and Jovian Adepo is talented jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer.
The next day Nellie and Manny manage to score their first times within the insane, almost Mad Max style, apocalyptic madness of silent move production with a dozen or more shoots occurring simultaneously.
While Manny, Nellie and Sidney climb the ranks behind and in front of the cameras, Jack’s star is waning. All struggle with the transition from silent film to sound and survival within the fantastic but unforgiving fame machine.
Along the way there are a host of interesting insights into the processes of making films at the time and the multitude of human excesses.
Babylon is a chaotic, flawed and thunderous film that demands to be seen at least once on the big screen.
Watched at the cinema.