Damien Chazelle always likes to start his movies with a bang

• Babylon, his most recent film, is superior to all of these tremendous starts.
• Babylon is an over-the-top tale of old Hollywood and the transition from silent films to talkies.
• Chazelle’s three-and-a-half-hour epic is usually absurd, hysterical, and continuously heightened

Damien Chazelle always likes to start his movies off with a bang. Babylon, his most recent film, is superior to all of these tremendous starts. A man getting completely covered in elephant feces coming straight from the source, a sexual encounter involving a pile of cocaine and piss, naked bodies writhing around a rowdy party, and rooms entirely devoted to the storage of every type of drug imaginable are all depicted in the opening of Babylon. Just the first five minutes are included.

With Babylon, Chazelle has produced a physical and figurative orgy of lunacy that can’t help but evoke the wild exploits of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boogie Nights. Babylon is an over-the-top tale of old Hollywood and the transition from silent films to talkies. Chazelle’s three-and-a-half-hour epic is usually absurd, hysterical, and continuously heightened in a way that is unquestionably not historically true. However, Chazelle’s absurdist interpretation of this crucial time in film history is less about the specifics and more about joining the ride, excess taken to the nth degree, which results in one of the best and most unique moviegoing experiences of the year.

However, the story of the three players and their love of movies really takes place within this party atmosphere. An ambitious actress named Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) just so happens to be present at the ideal moment (this crazy party). As a result, she is given a role in a movie.

She meets Mexican-American Manny Torres (Diego Calva) during the party; he shares her desire to work in cinema and, as a result of her initiative at the party, becomes Jack Conrad’s (Brad Pitt) assistant. The jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), the entertainment journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), who writes the phrases on the cue cards and typically has more common sense than anyone in Hollywood, are also among the insane.

While there is undoubtedly some historical accuracy to Babylon, as the switch to sound pictures did fundamentally alter the movie-going experience, and although we do encounter characters from the world of Hollywood at the time (such as Max Minghella’s Irving Thalberg or Samara Weaving’s hilariously cast Colleen Moore, who competes with Robbie’s Nellie), this is all just a way for Chazelle to play around on this playground.

Nellie and Manny’s first day on set, for instance, is shown by Chazelle as a flurry of activity, drugs, sex, and death as many films shoot next to one another and everyone is rushing to finish their projects before the sun sets. It is genuinely the Wild West, an untamed region that is open for settlement. But once more, Chazelle—who also penned the script—illustrates how thrilling this period must’ve been as well as how beautiful and impromptu the experience of making this kind of film could be within the insanity and barely restrained mayhem. It’s simple to notice the magic when the sun sets at just the perfect time, when an unexpectedly beautiful moment arises that couldn’t have been planned, or when a performance appears and leaves you speechless.

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