BABYLON REVISITED

"You had the spotlight. You'll live forever on celluloid. Be grateful. But it's the rest of us - the ones in the dark who just watched - who survive."

Last night I had a dream I saw a movie called Babylon.

In fact it wasn't a dream. I actually did go and see Damien Chazelle's latest film and it was a nightmarish and hilarious hallucination of old Hollywood, as if Robert DeNiro's opium addled character 'Noodles' in Sergio Leone's 'Once Upon A Time In America' had fantasised it all in his head like some sort of mad fever dream.

Definitely not for the faint hearted, 'Babylon' is like an X-Rated version of 'Singin' In The Rain'. At times I feared the film was stylistically more Baz Luhrmann than Stanley Donen but somehow I feel the gamble just about paid off in the end, though it will definitely be one of those films that divides opinion in the extreme. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone on the basis that they may never talk to me again after watching it. I don't need that kind of heat in my life anymore.

Personally, I enjoyed it very much despite its flaws and found its hubristic ambition quite jaw dropping at times, like watching a giant clown on a bicycle trying to spin fifty plates all at once. So what if they all come crashing down at some point towards the end? For a brief moment it is impressive to see the director take his creative chances without any self-regard for critics sharpening their knives.

The central premise of 'Babylon' appears to be that beneath all the tiaras and tinsel of Hollywood there are nine circles of Hell, that primordial ooze buried below the garden of celluloid Eden with all the glamour and make believe on screen and that the reality of the transition from silent films to talkies was far more brutal for the stars of the time than 'Singin' In The Rain' might have had us believe.

Brad Pitt's Jack Conrad (with echoes to Valentino) had the most pathos of all the characters I felt, a man who could be made up to be a god suddenly finding he has feet of clay, at least in regard to his mouth which destroys the transcendent illusion of his silent movie image when sound eventually arrives in the film business. In some ways he felt similar to Leonard DiCaprio's character Rick Dalton in Tarantino's 'Once Upon A Time In Hollywood', having to face the existential ticking of the clock in a world where the appearance of youth is worshipped like the sun.

As for the ending (don't worry, no spoilers here) all I'll say is it felt like a combination of Kubrick's '2001 : A Space Odyssey', Clouzot's 'La Prisonnière' and Monte Hellman's 'Two Lane Blacktop' and it's debatable how successful this smorgsbord of cosmic montage actually is. But it definitely leaves an impression, to say the least.

And at times I even thought that 'Babylon' could actually be a roadshow style movie in a similar vein to "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World' or similar types of zany, big budget goofy movies from the 1960s. However, in many ways I ultimately felt this could be Chazelle's version of Francis Ford Coppola's 'The Cotton Club' which famously helped in bankrupting the Italian American's film studio Zoetrope back in the 1980s. Whether 'Babylon' will reach 'Munchausen' degrees of failure I'm not sure and don't really care.

All I know is that for three hours, I'd completely forgotten about the family dog having suffered a stroke and sometimes that's all we need a film to do.

Help us forget.