Director Damien Chazelle is writing a love letter to cinema with Babylon starring Margot Robbie, Diego Calva and Brad Pitt.
Towards the middle of the 1920s, three Tinseltown residents: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the handsome young man of Hollywood cinema, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a young country woman who wants to be a star, and Manny Torres (Diego) that an excited film assistant. Chazelle tells an early Hollywood story with these three characters during 1920s, when only silent movies were made in Hollywood. However, Babylon is great and resplendent.
Building his story on these three characters, Chazelle takes the audience on a journey to the Hollywood of the 1920s. The film begins with a grand party held at the home of one of Hollywood’s leading producers. Music, dance, drugs, lots of sex and recording: “Cinema is great, what about Hollywood?” This grand house party is perhaps one of the most dynamic scenes in the movie. We see Nellie, a young country woman who dreams of becoming a star while seeing the charisma and dominance of Jack, who is now middle-aged, in Hollywood, and Manny, who will do “whatever” in the cinema and we see his eyes shining brightly into this magical world. Although the window through which Chazelle looks at Hollywood with its cinematographically acclaimed party scene with its fast-paced sequences and resplendent dances may be seen as a hysterical perspective by some, the director is embellishing the cinema from the opening scene. Nellie and Manny both want to be in this magical world, maybe to do something useful or be part of the party. At the end of the night, both Nellie and Manny will step into Hollywood.
In the continuation of the movie, we see a lot of Hollywood sets. The first of these is the epic set, where Nellie and Manny take their first steps into Hollywood, and a medieval war story is told: A Hollywood set in the mid-1920s, with two fronts made up of hundreds of soldiers and its director trying to frame the film’s lovers in the most romantic way without missing the sunset… With this epic battle scene, Chazelle compliments Hollywood’s passion for cinema with a Yeşilçam-like feeling and says, “If there is no cinema, this is great. What’s the meaning of sunset?” he asks. Chazelle continues to drag the audience from this romantic and warm scene, where two lovers kiss against the sunset in a valley, to scenes with high tempo.
