Damien Chazelle
Babylon

Bigger than life. Truly and completely.

Bigger than life and even death. An art, that of cinema, which, although for too long (and still today, indeed) has been considered "minor" - an aspect that Chazelle rightly addresses head-on, even angrily - is capable of transcending the laws of time and space and goes beyond mortality, which is the primary and ultimate condition of human existence. The transience, the materialism, the twilight to which we all inevitably sooner or later come. The life of an actor, it is known, is further accelerated compared to that of ordinary people. The actor, especially when they are not a mere extra but a Star, like the replicants of Blade Runner, "burns the candle at both ends," burns twice as bright, shines with greater intensity, attracts to themselves an apparently infinite and dazzling amount of light. But they pay the price later, burning quickly and inexorably extinguishing with twice the amount of pain and sadness.

It is the boulevard of broken dreams, the law of show business, the condition implicitly accepted in exchange for the sensation of having the lights upon oneself, the Limelight, the close-up.

Hollywood, as the world center of this great and expensive spectacle, is like a world apart, or rather, a world where everything is magnified and exaggerated. In the rhythms, the earnings, and also in the miseries, the downfalls. Because everything has a price and not everyone manages to endure the unwritten contractual condition mentioned above, the idea of being an immortal icon while living in their own prison of flesh. It is not easy to accept one's destiny, it is not easy to accept the dissolution like tears in rain. Time and progress are what renews everything, but which also leaves behind the entire previous world, in a heap of ashes and ruins of a glorious but ended, past era, which can only relive in metaphysical and memory terms. Which is still more than what happens to everyone else, but perhaps not quite enough. Not for everyone, at least. Among those who live first-hand this decline, this conclusion.

The fallen stars of Hollywood are like the last Emperor of Bertolucci, set aside in the name of an epochal change. Necessary but extremely painful. In the end, the transition from silent cinema to sound is still the greatest of revolutions today, despite various other changes in cinema. From the use of technicolor to continuous technological advancements in general. But nothing was ever as disruptive and traumatic as the passage from silent to sound. Nothing had the same before and after effect, and this within the same industry, taking away with it most of the protagonists of the old world. Condemned then to progressive and unbearable oblivion, which becomes unacceptable and leads to extreme consequences. Usually with a gunshot.

To those who say "but after all, cinema had already reached the pinnacle of its splendor in the days of silent films," I have always replied that this is partly true, but without sound, we would not have had Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. The film that talked exactly about this, a Star of the old world who could not accept not having her close-up anymore. And no coincidence, Gloria Swanson, who paradoxically was made immortal by Wilder’s film rather than by her career as a silent movie diva, is mentioned several times in Babylon.

The Gates of Babylon: Hollywood. As they say.

The modern Babylon. Center of wealth, power, sex, debauchery, and crime. Anger and Ellroy wrote about it extensively. Chazelle now joins the many illustrious predecessors who have sung of all this, with melancholy, sadness, fun, but above all an immense, unconditional love for this art that helps to live, protects from loneliness, becomes a protected place and intimate hearth, the last refuge. This is the greatest quality of Babylon: speaking of cinema not as the usual homage to the great "dream machine," but speaking of it as a refuge, indeed, from loneliness. Just as, in the end, Woody Allen did in The Purple Rose of Cairo, in that unforgettable ending, with Mia Farrow finding her only possible consolation for her bitterness and delusions in front of a big screen. Or in Hannah and Her Sisters, where Woody himself, after contemplating suicide following one of his typical existential crises, refrains from it, finding a vital spark in a cinema, thinking that, after all, even if there's no God and nothing after death, it is still worth living in a world where there’s an art capable of making you laugh as when watching a Marx Brothers movie.

Beyond some imperfections, perhaps, of some moments where Chazelle struggles to contain his immense zeal (Fellini/Sorrentino influences abound in dance and party scenes, Robbie almost always over-the-top) and the virtuosity, with his fourth film, he creates his greatest and most ambitious work, and his best work. Speaking to us and about us.

Chazelle, now, after Tornatore, Paul Thomas Anderson, Scorsese, Tarantino... Babylon too is a fresco of rise and fall, of nostalgia and unconditional faith in the magic of cinema. In the awareness that, of course, Hollywood swallows everything, leaving ashes and ruins like the fall of an Empire, but that despite it all, it will always be worth it. The game will always be worth the candle, even if this burns at both ends. Even if every star is destined to fall and every actor will share the same fate as the last Emperor Pu Yi. Because it is something that goes beyond the individual, whether Star or common worker, stagehand, operator, producer, extra.

If it is true that in the modern world nothing is sacred, there still remains one precious exception: Cinema.

A gigantic film that despite any possible flaw, every enthusiast must absolutely see. It's a pity for the very snobbish criticisms it is receiving. Maybe from the same individuals criticized in the film, who do not understand the profound meaning of cinema, continuing to consider it a minor art.