Babylon: Damien Chazelle's poison pen letter to Hollywood feels masturbatory in its performative self-flagellation

One of the first shots in Babylon is of an elephant's anus, just as the beast lets loose a torrent of faeces – ordure that, in a confusing touch of simulated vérité, remains smeared on the lens even after the cut. Certainly it has more in common with Blonde's noxious vision than it does with La La Land, Chazelle's old school musical paean to LA's starry-eyed dreamers, or Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's 1952 classic Singin' in the Rain, the film that Babylon – its three-plus hours rammed with allusions to Hollywood history and lore – takes as its primary touchstone. The film ultimately offers something like a square's take on Hollywood as seen through the eyes of Kenneth Anger – set down in his notorious work of yellow journalism, Hollywood Babylon. Chazelle allows for the existence of moments of something like grace, however corny: when the chaos of the desert film set coalesces at last, suddenly, just as the light is giving out, in the form of one perfect shot, with Jack Conrad taking his paramour into his arms; or when Manny goes to the cinema, decades on from his Hollywood misadventures, only for the screen to be taken over by a rapid-fire montage of shining moments from the entirety of the medium's life span, from Eadweard Muybridge right through to Avatar. Watch: Damien Chazelle's breakout movie Whiplash on ABC iview Photo shows Whiplash Never mind the breathtaking presumption of such a conceit, or of the decision to incorporate the work of filmmakers who had absolutely nothing to do with the machinations of the Dream Factory; never mind the jarring juxtaposition of James Cameron's Pandora and Ingmar Bergman's Persona – this is what we're fighting for, Chazelle seems to be saying, this crazy little thing called cinema that, goddammit, is bigger and more important than us.