Babylon (4K)
Extravagant ode by Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) to the golden years of Hollywood, featuring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.
BABYLON is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
For writer/director Damien Chazelle, BABYLON is the result of fifteen years of research and world-building that started in his head long before he typed the first draft of the script and stepped behind the camera to bring his long-gestating epic to life. ‘I wanted to look under the microscope at the early days of an art form and an industry, when both were still finding their footing,’ says Chazelle. As Chazelle dug deeper into the history of the silent film era, he came away with an impression of the people who lived through the Roaring Twenties that was radically different from the ways it had been portrayed in the past. ‘Hollywood in particular was a wilder, rowdier, more diverse, more free-form place than people realize.’
In this love letter to the movies, Brad Pitt plays a handsome leading man of a certain age whose career is on the slide. But at the centre of the story is Margot Robbie as an obsessive wannabe star with a gambling addiction.