As a cinematic study in risk and reward, the first four features from director Damien Chazelle just plain work, often dazzlingly. He knows how and when to move a camera. You know how rare that is these days? Steven Spielberg; Paul Thomas Anderson; a few others. And Chazelle.
His spare and lovely Harvard thesis project, “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” led to the outlandishly intense music-school melodrama “Whiplash.” That begot the massive popular success of “La La Land,” a swell variation on themes laid out in “Guy and Madeline.” Then came the intriguing Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man,” which Chazelle directed (Josh Singer wrote the screenplay).
Now the filmmaker returns as writer-director with “Babylon,” which takes place at the intersection of Hollywood dreams and industry realities in a somewhat harsher realm than “La La Land.” In the first 20 minutes alone, we get a faceful of elephant excrement, an anonymous starlet peeing on a naked, giggling Fatty Arbuckle archetype and —because we’re guests at a wild Hollywood party in 1926 Bel Air, California — a nonstop parade of nude, cocaine-snorting revelers.
