Babylon — Damien Chazelle

Beautiful images and an exceptional soundtrack

Quick Summary

Los Angeles in the 1920s. A tale of overweening ambition and madcap excess, Babylon traces the rise and fall of various characters during the creation of Hollywood, an era of limitless decadence and depravity.

My Thoughts

Babylon is a film with a beautiful ambition: to tell the transition from silent to talking pictures, and among other things the creation of the Hollywood studios. So, successful or not?

In fact, it’s a pity because rather than proposing something documentary, Damien Chazelle was content to show us the decadence, the debauchery, the orgies of the time, and above all the rise and fall of the actors, who can be adored or forgotten overnight.

The whole thing is a bit cliché, almost caricatured, and this comes out even in the main characters. We have a Margot Robbie who overplays slightly, which is not necessarily disengaging because it is part of her character, and a Brad Pitt who does the job. But to stop on these two would be reductive, all the actors are in fact quite good.

Otherwise the images are very beautiful, some scenes are funny, and the soundtrack is incredible. The scenes follow one another, sometimes they happen in parallel. In short, the whole thing is quite dynamic and we don’t see the time passing despite the long duration of the film.

So it’s a good movie, very entertaining even if we don’t get hooked to the characters, and interesting despite the main ambition of the movie a little bit put aside.

To Watch or Not to Watch?

Babylon is a very good movie that will please all those who will manage to get into the story, or who are not afraid of long movies.

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