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qutemag · 10 months ago

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The only problem with Babylon is Chazelle directed La La Land first -- an essay on La La Land and Babylon

by Benjamin Harkin

(Spoilers for both movies.)

Damien Chazelle is one of the most talented auteurs working today in Hollywood, and his two epics La La Land and Babylon are inverse meta mirrors Hollywood sees itself in and Chazelle interrogates the nature of the industry with a beautiful sense of composition, acting, scripting, and music. He recalls the classic Golden Ages where Hollywood is wistfully looked back on and punctures these periods where other directors of similar stature at their time in their careers tried and failed. Babylon should have been THE movie of 2022 into 2023, sabotaged only by a botched ad campaign and a sense that it wasn't another uplifting light movie like La La Land that everyone expected.

Take La La Land. Although set in modern day, the film is obviously a pastiche and ode to the cheerfully innocent and brightly coloured world of the 50s and 60s spate of Hollywood big budget musicals about young love and finally making it in the big town, following your dreams and being rejected right up until you find yourself, the person you're meant to be with, and then seeing everything fall into place with your passions. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a talented jazz piano player who is sick of marching to other people's drums. He diverts from the set list of his gig at a bar to play a melancholy but more tuneful song, leading to JK Simmons giving him the sack for his repeated impertinence, proving to be a pivotal moment when Mia (Emma Stone), a struggling up and coming actress who's spritely but can't quite land roles, bumps into him and looks to compliment him on the sheer artistry and vulnerability but he pushes past her, a Hollywood moment of meet cute that's tailor made to elicit a sweet moment. Their first date isn't told in flirty dialogue and smiles like a Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan rom-com, but purely in a song and tap dance number that channels Sinatra and Singin' in the Rain (1952), not as overdone and rigidly artificial as (500) Days of Summer's memorable break out of song but more a heartfelt melding of two people, realising they compliment each other against a scenic sunset perfectly.

The film effortlessly transitions in and out of song and dance numbers, each telegraphing where the two main characters are at in their lives, playing out character building scenes with music rather than words. Unlike Scorsese's flaming wreck of a passion project New York, New York (1977) that endeavoured to do the same sort of thing but got the cardinal rule of Hollywood musicals wrong: they can't be a downer. Chazelle covers the same material but ditches the abusive relationship angle that mucked up Scorsese's go for having between the musical numbers a wonderfully blossoming young love. This is a master at his craft firing on all cylinders. The party scene where she runs into him again is hilariously goofy, thoughtfully playful, and the camera tracks across everything going on and Mia's POV with a zest I've not seen from any other director. He gives the filmic electricity to let Emma Stone's bouncy acting and Ryan Gosling's smoldering nervous hot guy energy soar. Chazelle lets the camera roam free over his set pieces and its such an exhilaratingly unrestrained feeling that you can't help but be swept along.

Sebastian sells Mia on picking yourself up and following your dreams, and of course after he unloads on his love of jazz in a bar (winning her over on the genre as well) she of course starts getting call backs on her auditions. He's so thrilled after the date he wanders ponderingly along a beachside walkway and where any other two-bit director would have a silent scene of the waves methodically lapping and the protagonist deep in thought, Chazelle has Gosling whistle and play with a hat he spies on the ground, singing softly "city of stars, are you shining just for me?" in the fact he can't believe his luck, before taking the wife of an old couple passing by for a few dancing spins before moving on, the trace of a song done in what's both an understated way and faithful to the mood of that oft reused trope across romance movies of a protagonist staring into a public bench in contemplation of what could be.

Mia still flubs a few auditions but ducks out of some boring career networking dinner to find the one person she connects with and show him her passion -- cinema. They reunite when Sebastian thinks he's been stood up and goes into the movie anyway, and she walks in front of the screen and almost beckons him to join her in the movie onscreen as she walks to his seat and it moves swiftly to that classic shot of their fingers sliding together over their thighs, before the projector cutely goes on the fritz and they decide instead to reenact the scene portrayed in the movie they were just seeing and visit the observatory, sparks depicted as flying literally of a shot of a tesla coil shooting them out. They consummate their love in dancing into the stars of the observatory, the film breaking all reality with them floating up into the galaxy of the space observatory ceiling and they dance on the Milky Way briefly before coming back to the real, sitting in chairs making out.

The film then zips along all the familiar beats of these young love stories, with an extended cameo by John Legend to ruminate on the state of modern jazz thrown in for good measure. Sebastian and Mia start a scene bathed in bisexual lighting for no other reason than Chazelle is on his victory lap, then sit at a piano in Sebastian's cramped apartment and sing through the relationship.

Sebastian's music career goes on the up, his lame two key piano accompaniment for the big act to make a living no longer some hokey party band hire but John Legend's sold out rock band performances, the spotlight starting with him, then another on Mia so he can wink at her sitting in the audience that he's made it.

Cut to the fall season in Mia feeling left out with his career obligations. He makes an effort to win her over with an intimate dinner date but it proves a failure, Mia already is emotionally checked out underneath the familiar banter. The dinner becomes an uncomfortable truth when she confronts him on the fact he's in a steady ridiculously successful band career doing shit two key piano accompaniments for a rockstar. No better than when he was doing the trashy electronic keyboard at the party. Mia, despite all her career failings, remains true to her passion and Sebastian trades in his dream of owning a jazz club to follow the money. The dinner unceremoniously fails when Sebastian breaks any sense of politeness to take a shot at both Mia's failures in securing any acting roles and his belief rigidly pursuing her dreams has blinkered her to any chance at success, saying that she only liked him when he was down and out like her.

The movie goes the way you expect. At a photo shoot where Sebastian is expected to embrace his inner hated rockstar persona when asked to play something for a little flavour, he plays that same melancholy tune that got him booted from the jazz bar gig. He tries and tries to get Mia back but she's moved on.

The film balances an innocent sense of naivety with a bittersweet reverance as La La Land moves effortlessly to the climax of their time together. The film transcends reality once again and ends in a beautiful montage curving backwards on itself, running back all the memorable points of their relationship that could've gone wonderfully different with a swelling medley of song and dance set pieces. Their romance seen one final time through Hollywood's saccharine musical pomp. One final waltz and encore. A thoroughly Hollywood ending. The film of course was the talk of 2016 and an awards darling. Oscar bait at its finest.

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Babylon is a similar structure and filmic style, only transplanted onto a film so radically different in tone, character, and outlook that you'd think someone attempted to recreate La La Land in hell and all they had was the putrid and terrifying scenes lying around them. The film is a three hour bravura tour de force of disgust, near constant nods to abuse and exploitation in Hollywood, and a thesis that with the transition from the silent era to sound, practically every actor, filmmaker, and crew member, was hung out to dry as Hollywood reinvented itself for new technology, and yet Babylon is still somehow also a celebration of cinema like La La Land if only by showing just how much blood, sweat and tears goes on behind the camera of that perfect shot. It's Fellini's 8½ with arthouse sensibilities substituted for too much cocaine and elephant scat play. In the film production moments you can see Chazelle like Fellini getting out his frustrations and reaching catharsis in throwing the curtain back on the downsides of filmmaking.

The film opens with an elephant shitting onto the camera, a too long and too uncomfortable moment almost telling the audience to abandon hope and turn this off barely minutes in. This moves to an utterly depraved Hollywood orgy of all kinds of unspeakable acts, some based in real stories of scandal. Fatty Arbuckle, the first in a long line of Hollywood players revealed to be utterly depraved people, has his scandal depicted here of what could've been some sort of sexual assault or a lethal case of peritonitis, the story nobody could quite figure (still opinion is firmly divided on what transpired, even now), despite multiple trials that resulted in a woman dying in a trashed hotel room, and his career the first in the industry to have to be properly amputated over alleged sexual misconduct, unable to make the comeback only because the whole incident ended up a gift to fatphobia and a fateful heart attack the day Hollywood signed him another contract. Babylon depicts this as her peeing on him and then OD'ing and he left bawling in the aftermath shaking her limp body like a toddler having had his toy broken from smashing it too hard against the ground. The executives stand over the dead woman and Fatty's pathetic display and decide to move the real life elephant (yes, the one who shat on you) crashing the party up from 4am to 2am to distract while they wheel out the corpse.

Oh there's still a jazz band in this one all right (not a Chazelle film if there's no jazz), playing in the middle of the debauched proceedings all African-Americans, seemingly the only ones there among a sea of white writhing bodies, playing some twisted version of the last salute to decency. Threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, and the masses between people writhing in ungodly dance, mountains of cocaine for the people who start to lag, some guy bemoaning the fact he put an erratic chicken on too much coke and it has to be rescued, offhand mentions of pedophilia going on upstairs. Despite being about 100 years ago, not much has changed in Hollywood's dark corners.

Margot Robbie arrives as perhaps Emma Stone's shadow from the underworld, the complete loss of innocence after Mia actually having gotten parts and seen the inside of the industry rather than turned away every audition, abused and traumatised already so much before the movie begun that she enters the fray fooling the bouncer with a ridiculous stage name Nellie LaRoy as a vain and shallow attention-seeking hanger on, but her looks and scant dress, barely rags, wins over the rest as the life of the party, and her dream of living whatever heights of this twisted Hollywood life are realised on that fateful night. She dances with the best of them, spinning out of control only to prostrate herself and run her hand along the filthy floor like it was a plush couch for a moment before jumping back up to toss her cigarette and continue the dance. Her turn at stardom only comes because an executive sees her dancing on a table in his eyeline in the middle of dealing with corpse disposal and needs to give a director a hot woman to trial for their titillating silent film the next day.

Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) turns up in a suit as the classic A-lister, the Humphrey Bogart, frequent relationship troubles in lieu of his deep insecurities over career and inability to settle in tow. He is too good to get involved in anything overtly morally reprehensible but he still leaves every woman unhappy in marriage. He orders far too many bottles of alcohol in watching the nightmare to wash out his thoughts on the latest impending divorce.

The film centres on Manny (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who works as a low rung assistant at this party, somehow both in the background and involved in making calls the executives don't want to dirty their hands doing. He weaves in and out of the party as our vehicle into the picture, his shock long left for a determination to get the job done well and a possible promotion into a start in Hollywood. He consults the executive after suggesting to him the elephant to distract from the unsightly body, and the party wound down to strewn party streamers and the odd hungover person stumbling around, to suggest an aspiration to the Hollywood ladder and is instantly cut off and shot down: "You are where you belong."

This sets the stage for the next three hours. Manny falls in love with Nellie's wild child affect and is left in the dust for her celebrity-chasing, the first moment of many. He helps a thoroughly drunk Jack Conrad back to his mansion, where Jack pontificates a bit incoherently on the direction of Hollywood to an opera record he puts on before falling off his balcony, hitting a tiled roof on the way to splash in his pool face down, getting out with a flourish like his absolutely hammered behaviour was another one of his great performances.

Then comes arguably the best set piece in the film. Babylon splits into an utterly inspired montage of insanity in film production. Underpaid and unsafe crew members assemble en masse to chase Manny around a paddock after he drives a still deeply hungover Conrad to set. Producers throw Manny as a sacrificial lamb to the workers in their unwillingness to negotiate. The filmmakers talk over a shot with their star while he's chased by a giant crowd of angry labourers far below in the background.

Nellie LaRoy, having been picked at random, gets her dreams come true as a woman director sighs that she doesn't have the big tits they wanted but she'll have to do. Chazelle casted his wife Olivia Hamilton as the director and she does what's one of the best performances in the film, a woman director making her way in an industry of sleazy men, drama queens and kings, and so many flaming out alcoholics, dead focused on nothing but getting the movie in the can, but with enough funny hand gestures and eyebrow cocks to make the moments that much more farcical. Manny winds up having to be a director assistant to an absolute nutcase of an 'eccentric director', staging epic battle scenes where people are both fake and really are being killed in pursuit of the shot. They stand over a flag bearer who died by being run through by a flag, and make up the excuse on the fly he somehow did it himself and also he was probably going to die anyway. The montage contrasts with Nellie LaRoy getting her chance in a bar scene, which she dutifully whores her body in a drunk sweaty manic ballet of flashing and groping to all the men for the perverted pleasure of the camera capturing the moment. The woman director watches and is suitably impressed, like her, for Nellie's willingness to absolutely give herself up for the movie. Although of course there's a visible boner in an extra's pants that ruins the take. On top of this, Chazelle contrasts with Jack Conrad dictating a rewrite of his scene, doing his whoring offscreen, riffing for dirtier versions of famous lines in cinema that go beyond the period (this is set in the mid 20s) -- "And then he says hasta la vista, motherfucker." "And then he says frankly Scarlett, you're a cunt." And ending each with a "Type it!"

All this is hung on a narrative of Manny rushing to town to grab a replacement camera before the camera hire store closes, as the horses in the battle scene trampled over the ten the production had. He's told it'll be a half hour wait that becomes an hour. He gets back with whatever type of lens they had spare and Jack Conrad manages to stumble out his tent for the single most perfect shot of a romantic embrace at sunset, all the chaos and destruction for this one minute of film. The score in all these scenes is this bizarre riff on La La Land's music, a musical narration technique to have a throughline in these moments, a cacophony of drums and saxophone that keep the pace brisk and at tempo. Chazelle's work is frenetic filmmaking that's perfectly controlled.

The rest of the film is similar scenes of chaos in filmmaking and the industry. And nearly all the characters are composites or loose adaptations of real Hollywood figures of the time. Jack Conrad can't make the leap from silent to talking films and blames the one movie critic who used to flatter him. Nellie projectile vomiting at an upper class party with Hollywood elites where she's supposed to be upping her career profile. There's a subplot of the first major Asian-American actress in Hollywood Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) (based on real life counterpart Nancy Kwan of The World of Suzie Wong (1960) fame, a film exemplifying the issues), someone of grace and considered thought, her secret pleasure being the unspeakable lesbianism of the time, only to also be debased and wrote off constantly as 'the exotic Oriental' stereotype that dogged representation in Hollywood until only recently. Manny finally getting a chance at director, only to fuck up by trying to cast a by this time well off the rails coke fiend Nellie, and then debasing the African-American jazz lead Sidney (Jovan Adepo) by making him do the performance in caricature, blackface because the lights shining on him make his skin lighter than his colleagues, and they need the American South demographics to make profit so there has to be racism. A Mexican immigrant selling out another person of colour in order to make it.

And yet, beneath all the chaos and exploitation and Hollywood fucking over everyone, the film finishes with Manny years later coming back and seeing his beloved industry onscreen. Babylon ends with a romp through the history of film and Manny watching with tears flowing, a triumphant celebration of cinema magic set to a brilliant image of film being developed in the chemicals as all the noted movie scenes interplay across history. Babylon reveals itself as a tortured love letter to film, and at the same time the opposite message of La La Land, a thoroughly deranged epitaph to the fact Hollywood has no soul, and all those people who were hurt in bringing you that cinematic experience.

Babylon of course came out and bombed. The biggest flop of 2022. The trailer for the film sells you on fun parties and a deliciously gaudy time when the film goes out of its way to be uncomfortable in amidst the farcical comedy. Nobody who turned out for Margot Robbie in Barbie will want to tune in for her unhinged performance here.

The biggest problem though is unfortunately just which movie came first. Expectations were set by La La Land, and then torn apart by Babylon. Chazelle made a terrible calculation that the dark of Babylon would be a fitting follow up to one of the biggest and most upbeat Oscar darlings of the past decade. People went into Babylon expecting La La Land, and while they indeed got the most perfect companion piece, unfortunately people don't want to look at those dark corners Chazelle spotlighted. They wanted La La Land 2, and that closed mindedness and conservative nature of the mainstream moviegoing public is a shame. I can understand people not having the stomach for the film, but I thought there would be a few more interested.

(This actually isn't the first 8 minutes, but this is probably the most illustrative section of the film for this essay.)