Entertainment
Babylon review: Damien Chazelle film’s direction is breathtaking with jaw-dropping ending – and career best for Brad Pitt-Larushka Ivan-Zadeh-Entertainment – Metro
It’s a deranged masterpiece – your jaw will hit the floor at the end.
Margot Robbie stars as Nellie LaRoy in Babylon, one of the most deranged masterpiece films you’ll ever see (Picture: Scott Garfield)
‘When I first read this I thought – there is no way they’re gonna let us make this movie. It’s f***ing nuts!’ is how its star Margot Robbie introduced Babylon’s first, sneak peek, UK screening.
‘F***ing nuts’ proved a wild understatement.
An opening scene sees an elephant take a humungous poop over the screen, before it gets wrangled into the pulsing, sex & drugs & jazz-fuelled vortex of a Hollywood mansion party, whose depraved goings on earn this its 18 certificate.
The year is 1926, and our guides into this Bacchanalian debauchery are two outsiders: a wide-eyed immigrant worker called Manny (Narcos: Mexico’s Diego Calva) and a determined wannabe starlet, Nellie (a blazingly extraordinary Margot Robbie).
Assisted by a snowman-sized mound of cocaine, these two strangers share their deepest dreams.
The story follows their entwined showbiz destinies, alongside that of Jack Conrad (a career-best Brad Pitt), a debonair icon of the silent cinema forced to face the music as a new sound era dawns.
Brad Pitt absolutely delivers a career-best as Jack Conrad (left) alongside Diego Calva as Manny Torres (Picture: Scott Garfield)
Babylon marks Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle’s epic return to La La Land.
A grotesque and giddy and glorious mix of Boogie Nights, La Dolce Vita, Singin’ In The Rain, Wolf Of Wall Street and just about anything by Baz Lurhmann, it’s out to provoke a love/hate reaction. I’d consider it a deranged masterpiece.
The direction is breathtaking. One bravura extended sequence involving multiple sound stages set up in the Hollywood desert just has to be seen to be believed.
‘You ever been on a movie set before?’ Pitt’s character asks Manny.
Li Jun Li wows as Lady Fay Zhu (Picture: Paramount Pictures)
’It’s the most magical place in the world’. It’s also a battle zone of egos, awash with narcotic addiction and every form of abuse.
Yet as the film gets darker and weirder and crueller, it also gets sweeter. Because the true romance here is with cinema itself.
The giddy euphoria; the dangled immortality and the heartbreak. Funny, poignant and dazzling, Babylon’s sheer, ambitious energy is thrilling to be part of.
By the end my jaw had dropped to the floor so often it practically had to be stretchered out the building.
Out in cinemas on January 20.
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