It’s fascinating to see Damien Chazelle, whom I nicknamed ‘the gravedigger’, making a career reviving corpses.
I feel his pain.
He must have dreamed all his life of a grand cinema for a grand country only to find cold bodies when stepping into the holy temple. Yet, if America’s glorious past can’t be revived, count on him to do the mortician's job: Whiplash was a shrine to Jazz, Lalaland the funerary pyre of musical comedy, First Man a grand memorial to the space race, and Babylon is the Pharaoh's tomb of early Hollywood.
It’s a bit as if Chazelle is taking a stroll in the nation’s cemetery, frantically excavating its best remnants to show us how their excellence once emerged. “That’s how they did it”, he says, “and so should we!” He exhorts us to go on with the American dream at a time when hesitation is in the air. While neither devoted eulogies nor lavish budgets can bring life back, his enthusiasm for the task certainly makes his films fun-eral.
What kind of fun though? Nothing light, it’s either pain and sacrifice (Whiplash, Lalaland, First Man) or debauchery and self-destruction (Babylon). What matters is the effort to go on. All of Chazelle’s characters endure something.
Babylon reminds me of The Romans in their Decadence, a 19th-century Neo-classical painting by the now-forgotten Thomas Couture. Big, messy, and over the top, it was highly praised by the Parisian academy as a piece of bravado.
No such fate for Babylon as our own academy almost entirely ignored it. If there is something Hollywood detests, it’s hearing nails banged on its coffin.
Grandiose ambition is almost a must today as the industry has been repeating to its incoming directors: “go big or go home cinema”. To justify their claim to the big screen, filmmakers’ strategies range from using ultra-wide lenses for ultra-wide spaces, as in Nomadland by Chloé Zhao, to filling the screen to the brim with a cacophony of senses, as in Babylon.
It’s as if films have to be big in image and in sound to have a shot at theater screenings. This correlation always existed but in the past, it was an exhilarating exploration of the medium rather than a justification for its existence.
Speaking of the cacophony of the senses, I made the comparison with Couture’s The Romans in their Decadence but could, all the same, have mentioned The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix. Same outsized ambition, same ruthless decadence, same recording of an imminent collapse.
But Chazelle is definitively more of a Neoclassic film director, even his orgies are clean and his ethos is closer to Calvinism than Romanticism. Sacrifice, yes, but only after a hard day’s work.
Couture's The Romans in their Decadence was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1847. A year after, the revolution toppled the July Monarchy and Courbet painted A Burial At Ornans, the drab and realistic depiction of a commoner's funeral.
Again, we are in a cemetery, but Courbet chose to give his simple man’s burial the proportions traditionally reserved for mythological or historical subjects. His canvas is massive, something unthinkable at the time for the inhumation of a nobody in a provincial town. Think Chloé Zhao giving center-role to forgotten drifters in her epic Nomadland.
Rather than use professional models, which was normal practice, Courbet chose to paint the same townspeople who had been present at the burial, thus emphasizing the 'truthful' character of his painting. Nomadland, again.
Zhao’s star-led foray into America’s crumbling corners catches something dying too. But while she uses Courbet’s trick of making the peripheral grandiose, she lacks his humor. Remember the dog in Nomadland?
Zhao got rid of the mutt to avoid a film cliché while Courbet kept his and made him an incongruous but much-needed reminder of how dumb and stubborn life can be even in the middle of the most tragic loss.