IGNORE THE BABBLE, ‘BABYLON’ IS WORTH IT

The critical and popular reception to Damien Chazelle’s sprawling epic of Hollywood excess in the dying days of the silent era has been divisive. That’s understandable for a film featuring everything from an opening scene that climaxes with a shower of elephant dung to a woman relieving herself on an infantilised fat man.

It’s a more jaded vision of the Hollywood dream factory than Chazelle’s Oscarwinning sing-a-long La La Land, but Babylon is, despite its shortcomings and the demands it makes on the audience, a more rewarding film when you give it a chance.

It’s more ambitious, exhausting and frustrating, but ultimately braver. Chazelle’s period saga offers an imaginative tribute to the magic of the big screen, our fascination with its beautiful creations and the often tragically self-destructive toll that producing them takes on their creators.

The story begins in 1926, when the aforementioned elephant is scheduled to be the piéce de résistance at a Hollywood producer’s bacchanale that’s part Great Gatsby, part Studio 54 and part Hieronymus Bosch in its excess. Here we meet the trio of loosely connected players in the world of what underground director and avant-garde enfant terrible Kenneth Anger christened “Hollywood Babylon” in his salacious history of the era’s sex scandals, perversions and corruption.

There’s Mexican immigrant Manny Torres (Diego Calva), who’s chasing his dream to work on a real film set by fulfilling duties as gofer for the host of the party. Manny is smitten by the gatecrashing arrival of self-confident Nellie LeRoy (Margot Robbie), a nobody bent on becoming a somebody by sunrise.

Taking part in the night’s festivities with the jaded cool of a man who has been to many such parties before is the veteran silent star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt). By the time he stumbles off in the morning he will have broken another marriage and found a new hapless but eager assistant in Manny.

Nellie skips out of the dark depravities at the end of the party into her first appearance in a film the next morning and a stratospheric rise as the new “it girl”. And while Manny finds himself rising through Hollywood as a producer, Jack is in for a rough ride as the oncoming technological advancement of sound gives him and Hollywood some nasty surprises.

Filled with dazzling set pieces and eccentrically cartoonish characters, Chazelle’s film ends with a bravado sequence that offers an affirmative and sentimental ode to the pleasures and iconic memories that the silver screen would go on to offer in the subsequent decades.

It all adds up to a film that, while overstuffed with ideas and favouring spectacle over self-searching, provides dizzying celebration of the origins of a medium that still has plenty of pizazz left in its tank, without needing to look to superheroes and CGI for salvation. Babylon is on circuit.