Babylon (2022)

 

The thing that struck me most about Babylon was that it's almost always firing on all cylinders, people screaming, music blaring, the film itself shuffling rapidly through images.  It offers you few breaks in 189 minutes.  Much is made of its "hedonism," "wallowing in excess and sin," "debauchery," "bacchanalia," and so on, but in the end this is not shocking except for one moment, maybe two moments near the beginning that, in fairness, are hard to forget.  I'm not saying it's tame.  It's just on the level with a great deal of other R-rated American gross-out comedies.  

It isn't shocking or disgusting, but it is unruly.  The way it treats cinema is like a child upending a box of blocks and building them into teetering structures.  There's a scene in which director Ruth Adler witnesses actress Nellie LaRoy's ability to cry on command and reacts as if she's just received a new toy, and makes everyone shoot the same scene dozens of times just to experiment. 

Though as a few people have pointed out, Babylon actually shows very little interest in silent cinema.  The characters talk about movies but barely watch them, and when they do it's only to see their own faces, or to conduct businesslike study of audience reactions.  And when they talk about movies, they speak in platitudes respecting their "magic" and the belief that they offer them, if not immortality, contact with something immortal. 

Among people I follow, some dislike La La Land because of the boneheaded takes it offers up on the jazz and old movies the characters claim to love.  Then there are people who like it because they think it's an incisive, sad picture of postmodern narcissists, both behind and in front of the camera.  The characters grasp at fantasies constructed from impressions of past artworks, but only understand those artworks through a vague notion of their "greatness," and no notion of where they really came from.  Babylon makes it easy to accept the latter reading, and so should Whiplash.  Chazelle is a film student and publicly a film fan, but his films hardly seem to like film fans. 

La La Land signed off with an homage to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  The most important difference is that at the end of La La Land, the two leads have both become fabulously successful, and in Cherbourg they have not.  Cherbourg has the power to enrich your perception of unremarkable things, while La La Land shows you how shallow some remarkable things really are.  The coda is like McCarthy's speech in Anatomy of a Murder: you can only buy it if you haven't been paying attention.  And if you were paying attention, you see the point is that people fall for their own tricks and out of touch with history, whether they're lawyers or artists.  Or film students. 

In Babylon, there are three options for "cinephilia": exploitation of a reactionary culture, pretentious self-aggrandizing, and juvenile playfulness.  None of them are "good," but the film has a bit of sympathy for the last one.  It's strange, then, that it ends with a montage of clips from films as diverse as Begone Dull Care, Duck Amuck, Persona, Avatar, what might have been Kwaidan, and arguably Blue.  There's no way anyone could assemble this and think that cinema was a unified thing whose whole background could be captured, even in a film as long as this one.  Yet no character in the film actually holds this perspective, or is even attempting to do something that would reflect it.  Certainly not the audience members the film depicts sitting in movie theaters, vessels for canned reactions. 

It ends inside a movie theater, a character smiling at the screen just after the clip show.  This could be another thing you can only buy if you haven't been paying attention.  Or, if you're more optimistic, maybe the character in that scene is finally able to accept a wider scope after having given up the effort to become immortal by appending the industry to himself.  Goodbye cinephilia, hello cinema.  Though the idea that this character would gain this perspective from watching Singin' in the Rain is rather out of step with the rest of the film after all he's done.  

There are avid film viewers who will rub shoulders with people who call themselves "cinephiles," but cringe at the idea of calling themselves that, and equally cringe at abstract, lyrical paeans to "movie magic."  Babylon and La La Land reflect the mindset of someone like that.  On the other hand, the film's lack of interest in silent cinema might be something more genuine and unconscious, considering the clip show includes so little from the silent era.

It's worth noting that most people who see La La Land like it and take it at face value as a fun, pretty, bittersweet romance.  There's a huge gap between what they think and what the people who think it's about postmodern narcissism think.  There is no such gap for Babylon, which is a gross-out comedy regardless of what you read into it.