In short: Babylon (2022)

One of the very first shots in Damien Chazelle’s is of an elephant endlessly projectile crapping into (and over, and around, and probably under) the camera, so you really can’t blame the movie for not being honest about itself, and not just about its preoccupation with bodily fluids.

Supposedly, this follows the travails of three characters – played by Diego Calva, Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt – through the decadent early years of Hollywood and portrays the way anarchy turned into just another business In theory it also says some stuff about the perniciousness of institutional racism. In practice, this is either filmic diarrhoea or a director incessantly masturbating into your eyes.

I am generally perfectly fine with showy direction, and have rather a lot of favourite directors who follow the rule of style as substance, but there’s a difference between focussing on style and showing off so much, a film’s sheer excess becomes so huge, it actually starts to feel lifeless through it, something Chazelle achieves here in a series of never-ending, over-edited, over-scored, over-planned, and over-staged sequences. There’s really not a single second of this damn thing that leaves room for any idea or performance to breathe. It’s all just shouting, blaring, stupid edits, and the least interesting idea of decadence and excess spat into endless, never-ending, really never, never ending scenes of a length you usually only find in backyard horror movies. Makers of those of course have the excuse of not having directed a pretty great Academy Award winning musical, among other things. This thing just makes Michael Bay look restrained.

Given its three hour (though it rather feels like three days) length, it’s pretty astonishing how little Babylon actually has to say about its characters or early Hollywood. All of its self-referentiality never rises about the quality of mediocre in-jokes, so much so that I now find some of my criticism towards Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood rather crude, for Tarantino’s film has life and interest in its characters as human beings, and fulfils ambitions beyond shouting in your face for three hours.

Babylon has Brad Pitt sleepwalking, Calva making googly eyes at Robbie, and Robbie doing Harley Quinn with a different haircut while around them, an intensely loud amount of nothing screeches. At least, someone has finally found the perfect dictionary example for “overdirected”.