Babylon's over twenty years of fundamentally decadent culture compressed into.a little over 3 hours seemed over-the-top to me at first, until I realized that the film's depravity was not gratuitous. It was essential to the real life facts that had to be condensed to fit the film's time constraints. The sexual excesses were also all of a piece with the absurd production faults depicted in the movie's stories about movie making in that time and place.
Contrapuntal accents in movie making vignettes expressing hope and humanity, for example the audience's reaction to. Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer, and in the Jovan Adepo character Sidney Palmer's glorious jazz artistry, were accentuated that much more by the background of a maximally debauched culture.
Having written these thoughts, I am now getting a David Lynch-ian read off of the mix of perfect flaws in Babylon's Production Design. I see a self-referential critique on the inevitable nuts and bolts of movie making, similar to the obviously mechanical stuffed robin that is central to the closing frames of another thematic hybrid of cinema, Lynch's film Blue Velvet.
Contrapuntal accents in movie making vignettes expressing hope and humanity, for example the audience's reaction to. Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer, and in the Jovan Adepo character Sidney Palmer's glorious jazz artistry, were accentuated that much more by the background of a maximally debauched culture.
Having written these thoughts, I am now getting a David Lynch-ian read off of the mix of perfect flaws in Babylon's Production Design. I see a self-referential critique on the inevitable nuts and bolts of movie making, similar to the obviously mechanical stuffed robin that is central to the closing frames of another thematic hybrid of cinema, Lynch's film Blue Velvet.