The next film to note in your agenda? Babylon. This new rewriting of the Hollywood golden age planned for 2023 and directed by Damien Chazelle offers a new light, between fiction and reality, on the film industry and one of its founding moments: the arrival of words in cinema, an art that was silent until then. While we already know the Franco-American director very well for his appetite for musical films such as Whiplash, First Man and La La Land, for which he won the Oscar for best director in 2016, everything suggests the arrival of a new masterpiece with Babylon. Here is everything we already know about it.

A Hollywood plot

Like a dive into the Hollywood of the 1920s, Babylon is presented as a historical drama about a major cultural revolution of that time: the moment when the cinema started to speak. This evolution towards a more modern industry was difficult in many ways for the actors and actresses (suppression of mimicry and exaggerated acting, diction work, difficult reception by the audience, etc.), who see their disappearance at the same time as that of silent cinema. It is on this point of historical rupture that lies the crux of the plot. While some characters should be entirely fictional, others will be inspired by real personalities such as Charlie Chaplin and John Gilbert, emblematic figures of the silent era, Clara Bow, icon of the Roaring Twenties, or Anna May Wong, another popular actress (but still suffering from the lack of representation of minorities on the sets and screens of Western cinema, as Ryan Murphy‘s Hollywood series already mentioned in 2020).

A star-studded cast

It is perhaps in its casting that the strength of this feature film lies for the moment. Margot Robbie, who is currently at the heart of cultural news with the film Barbie by Greta Gerwig, has been chosen for the lead role of Clara Bow. The Australian actress will share the lead with Brad Pitt, who will play John Gilbert. Four years after Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino, these two cinematic counterparts can once again revive this age.