The “La La Land” director’s over-the-top paean to silent Hollywood, starring Margot Robbie as a hopeful actress and Brad Pitt as an affable superstar, amounts to a frenzied scrapbook.
How much is too much? Try “Babylon,” the latest film from Damien Chazelle. Within five minutes, we realize that excess is in the air—and, indeed, all over the camera lens, in the form of elephant dung. The ensuing half hour, an excursion into the orgiastic, brings us a woman peeing onto the bloated belly of a partygoer, alpine hills of cocaine, and a dwarf using a giant phallus as a pogo stick.
The mission of “Babylon” is to laud the last hurrah of silent cinema. Cinéastes can have fun tracing the roots of Chazelle’s fictional figures. Jack has a dash of John Gilbert, whose smolderings with Greta Garbo, in “Flesh and the Devil,” were a real-life highlight of 1926. Anna May Wong, the leading Asian American idol of the period, is the obvious model for Lady Fay Zhu , though Fay’s very public smooching of a woman is more of a nod to Marlene Dietrich, in “Morocco” .
And so to the grand finale. When and where it occurs I won’t reveal. Suffice to say that it includes a splash of “Singin’ in the Rain” —generous but also ill-advised, since it merely triggers an instant desire for less “Babylon” and more Gene Kelly. Undaunted, Chazelle then offers a frenzied scrapbook of the medium’s greatest hits, with bits of Bergman, Kubrick, Godard, and God knows what all pasted together.
If Elisabeth does not contract that infectious condition, it is not for lack of trying. In England, she seeks out Bay , her riding instructor. “I love to look at you looking at me,” she tells him, assuming command of the male gaze. In Bavaria, she swims naked with her cousin Ludwig II , and permits him to pour melted chocolate into her open mouth, but that is the limit of their intimacy.
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