'Babylon': much ado about nothing

Lately, love letters to the cinema have been piling up, a worrying symptom that it may be ill and that it needs its most distinguished members to remember its essence, its invincible nature, the eternal miracle that it has given people for almost 128 years.

Damien Chazelle offers him his tribute in

intending to create an opulent and dizzying show, going back to the twenties of the last century, when it was silent and splendid, packed with legendary performers who could only express themselves with their faces and bodies in theaters. from all over the world permanently packed with an audience with an inexhaustible capacity for astonishment, who laughed, was anguished and moved by what was happening to the beings who inhabited the screens.

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'Babylon', a love song to unbridled Hollywood that died with the advent of sound

The malevolent and sarcastic Kenneth Anger, a luxury gossip, as intelligent as he is scathing, narrated in his two installments of the book

that everything was rampage, alcohol and drugs in infinite lust in the real existence of the sellers of dreams, in those studios that made so many movies with pretensions and moral messages.

Damien Chazelle spends three hours recreating that vertiginous and orgiastic world in which all the show business that had invented cinema participated.

And seeing the absolute high these people were floating in night after night and day after day, I wonder about their physical and mental state when they had to work.

Or, perhaps, in those days there was no hangover.

Or they always rolled blind from chemicals without it affecting what they were creating.

The long opening of

tends to dazzle the viewer through explosive imagery and torrential music.

Same thing happened at startup.

with people in the morning traffic to enter Los Angeles, abandoning their cars and beginning to sing and dance.

Chazelle goes for the sing-and-dance march as the ultimate expression of her feelings.

That initial brilliance was fading.

The

same thing happens to

After a while the music, regardless of its quality, starts to thunder me.

And the pasote of the characters seems very long to me.

And what else does Chazelle tell us about this tribe?

Well, some had real magic when they stood in front of the camera.

It centers on a silent film idol, a mix of John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks, a charming guy who is painfully shipwrecked when the spoken word begins, left without present or future, destined for the darkest.

And of a foul-mouthed, vitalist, luminous, sexy girl, with a defiant and wild point, who falls in love with viewers and becomes a star.

Her future is also short.

Everything is excessive in the description of situations and characters.

The first part has a magnet at times.

But the outcome drags on.

There are plenty of surprises and the desire of the director to stir the public all the time.

Much ado About Nothing.

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I guess

will be blessed with quite a few Oscars.

Hollywood has always liked to look at its navel.

Sometimes it has been possible with this theme to make masterpieces.

I do not even come close to including this film with so many lofty claims in that category.

Brad Pitt remains very handsome, he is talented and his work never fails, but I have the feeling that he could give more, that he does not find memorable characters.

And Margot Robbie always wants to take over the world and it is possible that she will succeed.

She is versatile, she has personality, she feels comfortable in the skin of volcanic characters.

Babylon

Directed by:

Damien Chezelle.

Cast:

Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Olivia Wilde, Flea, Tobey Maguire. 

Genre:

drama.

United States, 2022.

Duration:

189 minutes.

Premiere: January 20.

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