Damien Chazelle offers a spectacular journey through time with the impressive fresco babylon. He returned to the early days of Hollywood, before the advent of talkies in the 1920s. “It was a real circus,” he explains to 20 minutes. Morals were free and so were people. You could find glory but also lose your mind. What the film demonstrates brilliantly.
Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, already reunited in Once Upon A Time in… Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino, are dazzling. He is dignified and tired as a star on the decline carried on the bottle. She is bubbly and seductive as an actress on her way to fame.
A cry of love at the cinema
“I have been a film buff since I was very young, says the director of whiplash, La La Land and first-man. It took me fifteen years to finalize this project, which aims to show the beginnings of the Hollywood legend, including his excesses. The tone is set from the start of the film with a mind-blowing orgy scene in the house of a wealthy producer. From the first images, a young Mexican (Diego Calvarevelation of the film) tries to find his place in this industry which fascinates him to the point of making him forget where he comes from.
“Hollywood quickly sanitized, insists Damien Chazelle, but those years were pure madness, the one that inhabited the artists creating films in the heart of the desert. Dantesque parties but above all hasty shootings sometimes putting performers and teams in danger are reborn before the eyes of the spectator who has the impression of being at the heart of the history of the 7th Art. “My film is a cry of love to the cinema and to those who create it”, insists Damien Chazelle. babylon vibrates with his passion for more than three hours of projection.
Yesterday and today
The evolution of cinema finds an echo in that of well-drawn characters, emblematic of an art and an era. “It is not essential to suffer to succeed, insists Damien Chazelle, but I know artists who have paid a high price and have been crushed by the industry. My film is about both yesterday and today. » A sumptuous reconstruction and a virtuoso staging make babylonan aesthetic shock capable of seducing both the general public and hardcore moviegoers.