How much is too much? Try “Babylon,” the latest film from Damien Chazelle. Within five minutes, we realize that excess is in the air—and, indeed, all over the camera lens, in the form of elephant dung. The ensuing half hour, an excursion into the orgiastic, brings us a woman peeing onto the bloated belly of a partygoer, alpine hills of cocaine, and a dwarf using a giant phallus as a pogo stick. Still to come: a movie producer walking around in the desert, at night, with his head stuck in a toilet seat, and, by way of a bonne bouche, toward the end of the feast, a guy who consumes live rats. Happy now?
This is a film about films and filming. It would swallow itself if it could. Much of the saga, which kicks off in 1926, is set in Hollywood, and in the blast area that surrounds it. Our guide to the festivities is Manny (Diego Calva), who rises from the rank of lowly fixer to that of studio executive, yet never achieves the solidity of a main character. At the initial soirée, he falls for a gadabout named Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who can’t park a car without crashing into a statue, and who caps off her evening with a crowd surf. She, too, will reach undreamed-of heights. Tellingly, both she and Manny begin their ascent on the day after the debauch; he becomes a personal assistant to an affable superstar, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), while Nellie, at short notice, gets the opportunity to flaunt her acting skills. This she does with gusto—hoofing, grinning, and turning her tears on and off like a plumber fixing a faucet.
The mission of “Babylon” is to laud the last hurrah of silent cinema. (Nothing lands with a more predictable clunk than the sequence in which Manny goes to New York to catch the première of “The Jazz Singer,” in 1927, rushes to a pay phone, and exclaims to Jack, back in Los Angeles, “Everything is going to change.”) Cinéastes can have fun tracing the roots of Chazelle’s fictional figures. Jack has a dash of John Gilbert, whose smolderings with Greta Garbo, in “Flesh and the Devil,” were a real-life highlight of 1926. Anna May Wong, the leading Asian American idol of the period, is the obvious model for Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), though Fay’s very public smooching of a woman is more of a nod to Marlene Dietrich, in “Morocco” (1930). As for Nellie, the unblushing gall with which she steals a scene from another actress is pure Clara Bow—who, like Nellie, had a mother in a sanitarium. Then, there’s Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella). I can’t prove anything, but I reckon that he’s based on Irving Thalberg.
The strange thing is that, after more than three hours, “Babylon” doesn’t leave you any the wiser, in regard to pre-talkies Hollywood, than you were at the outset. One lesson of “The Parade’s Gone By,” Kevin Brownlow’s engrossing study of the era, is that the movie industry was, above all, industrious, learning fast from trial and error; the toil that we witness in “Babylon,” on the other hand, consists of jinks, japes, and flaming meltdowns. The film sets seem to be run by the Keystone Cops, and Chazelle strains every muscle—in the editing, as in the scurries of the camera—to stop the fever breaking. Emma Stone, in Chazelle’s “La La Land” (2016), was granted a beautiful lull in which to deliver her saddest song, but Margot Robbie has no such chance to breathe. Her performance isn’t over the top, but her character, as conceived and written, most definitely is, and she has no option but to follow suit. Such is “Babylon.” It goes nowhere, in a mad rush.
And so to the grand finale. When and where it occurs I won’t reveal. Suffice to say that it includes a splash of “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952)—generous but also ill-advised, since it merely triggers an instant desire for less “Babylon” and more Gene Kelly. Undaunted, Chazelle then offers a frenzied scrapbook of the medium’s greatest hits, with bits of Bergman, Kubrick, Godard, and God knows what all pasted together. The implication is that Jack, Nellie, Fay, and the gang, delirious and doomed as they were, did not strive in vain, and that from their efforts bloomed the glory of cinema, to which “Babylon” is a crowning valediction. In the brave words of Jack Conrad, “What I do means something.” If you say so, Jack.
For some reason, we’re in the middle of a Sissi fit. The life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, often known as Sissi, or Sisi, has never lacked for commemoration. Ever since she was killed by an Italian anarchist, in 1898, she has acquired a patina of myth. The first movie about her was released in 1921, and a three-part bio-pic, starring Romy Schneider, and commencing with “Sissi,” in 1955, has proved so abidingly popular that German and Austrian families still watch it at Christmas, on TV. Recently, interest has welled up afresh. Netflix paid tribute with “The Empress,” a second series of which is in the works. Now we have “Corsage,” a new film directed by Marie Kreutzer, which doesn’t so much embrace the Sissi legend as squeeze it tight and wait for it to howl.
The Empress, in “Corsage,” is played by Vicky Krieps. The tough intelligence that she brought to “Phantom Thread” (2017) is deployed again here, armored with amusement: a vital shield, given that Elisabeth, according to this telling of the tale, needed all the armor she could get. Of her youth, and the early years of her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister)—the wedding took place in 1854, when she was sixteen—the film shows us nothing, but, from the start, we find a woman enchained. Sissi is turning forty (the age, she says, at which “a person begins to disperse and fade”), and she first appears under water, holding her breath in the bath, to see how long she can last without air. Next comes a closeup of her waist, being laced with pitiless pressure, at her own behest, into a corset. Ah, so that’s what the title means.
The driving purpose of these images is not hard to discern. What Kreutzer aims to impress upon us is the effect of smothering and constraint—not only upon her heroine but also upon the female sex, at every social stratum, under Habsburg rule. When Her Imperial Highness tours a Viennese asylum for those of unsound mind, she graciously brings little boxes of candied violets, yet her expression suggests a keener sympathy. One woman is strapped to a bed inside a netted cage; another is bound like a mummy. “She looks as though she wants to weep but can’t,” Elisabeth says. Of a shuddering inmate she asks, “What’s wrong with her?” A doctor replies, “Adultery, Your Majesty.”
If Elisabeth does not contract that infectious condition, it is not for lack of trying. In England, she seeks out Bay (Colin Morgan), her riding instructor. “I love to look at you looking at me,” she tells him, assuming command of the male gaze. In Bavaria, she swims naked with her cousin Ludwig II (Manuel Rubey), and permits him to pour melted chocolate into her open mouth, but that is the limit of their intimacy. The film is a catalogue of her lunges at liberation; at the risk of heresy, I found myself growing more interested in the stiff souls who accompany the Empress, torn between their devotion to her and annoyance at her calculated whims. None are stiffer than her solemn young daughter Valerie (Rosa Hajjaj), who views her mother, correctly, as more childish than she herself.
The movie’s means of approach is the punky-historical—a stance familiar to fans of “Marie Antoinette” (2006) and “The Favourite” (2018). The trick is to marry detailed reconstruction with impudent anachronism, to prevent us from settling into a costume drama as if it were a comfortable couch. Thus, after fainting (or pretending to faint) at a ceremony, the Empress climbs a staircase, in slow motion, and stares directly at us; exiting a dinner, she gives the finger to the remaining guests; and, seated outside her summer residence, she is serenaded by a harpist who warbles the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By.” The sharpest jolt is provided by Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield), who meets Elisabeth in 1878 and says, “I would like to film you.” She is baffled by the verb, but he captures her running, jumping, and soundlessly screaming on his new-fangled device.
This is nonsense. The earliest surviving footage shot by Le Prince—by anyone in the world, some would argue—dates from 1888. Does it matter that Kreutzer gets the fangling wrong by ten years? Or that she alters the circumstances of Elisabeth’s death entirely, making them less bizarre than they were? Not really. Not if you adhere to the principle that established facts are a check on the imagination, and that the only possible function of formality, whether in governance, conduct, or dress, is to stunt the free play of feelings. No one can quarrel with the smart and forthright style in which “Corsage” espouses that creed. It’s worth asking, though, if there isn’t something easy in the automatic ridicule of manners past. Just as we look back and smile at the sugary confection of “Sissi,” this movie, too, might yet come to be seen as a twisted curiosity of its time. ♦
