Babylon

Damien Chazelle refuses to hang the arrival of sound on one protagonist. Four careers climb and collapse beside each other, and the film gives the front of its 189 minutes to one party rather than to plot, holding the title card until it ends. Linus Sandgren shot it on anamorphic 35mm. Four Kodak Vision3 stocks were each push processed one stop at FotoKem, and the Atlas Orion lenses hand polished so highlights would bloom. The party was staged at Shea’s Castle, the Kinoscope studio scenes on a set in a valley at Piru. Chazelle shot that party halfway through production, not at the start. The characters are composites of real people. Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy begins from Clara Bow, Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad draws on John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks, Lady Fay Zhu from Anna May Wong. The Academy nominated the film in three categories, costume design, production design and original score, and it lost all three. A good fit if you want the opening held in one location, the camera wandering through a crowd instead of cutting, and read Sandgren’s blown out highlights as a decision rather than a fault. Not for you if that party reads as the real story being postponed, or if the elephant, the vomit and the drug scenes cannot land as comedy.