Babylon

With Damien Chazelle directing (LaLa Land, Whiplash), it comes as little surprise that Babylon would have such an intense musical focus for its trailer, which certainly has been making the rounds at the Toronto International Film Festival. Justin Hurwitz returns as composer, helping to cement their reputation as a special collaborative partnership. Every so often, an auteur director will have longtime collaborators, especially in music; Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, James Cameron and James Horner, or Tim Burton and Danny Elfman all spring to mind as easy examples of such a phenomenon. With Babylon, Chazelle and Hurwitz surely enter such a category (as if there were any doubt).

In what is likely one of the top trailers of the year in our books, not only does Babylon’s trailer feature a top-notch soundtrack as it tracks excess and depravity in early Hollywood, but it also features some audiovisual techniques in its edit that are exceptionally rare, if not innovative. For example, it’s only at 1:06 that the diegetic source of the soundtrack is fully revealed—in terms of the trailer form, truly playing a long game that serves both to mildly disorient and engage the audioviewer. (At 0:40, there’s a snippet of percussion that matches the soundtrack, but it’s so brief as to constitute a play on the subconscious.)

Moreover, there’s an intense sonic contrast between the two characters speaking alone in a room (while heavily suggesting they’re doing hard drugs) and the extreme bombast of the other scenes. This flipping back and forth between these scenarios is only further emphasized by the fact that the audio in the more intimate scenes doesn’t sound particularly well mic’d. With a bit of echo and hollowness reminiscent of a field recording, the candid and intimate nature of these scenes is emphasized, which contrasts well with the slickness and spectacle of the crowd scenes.

At 0:53, the interplay between soundtrack and visual is brought to its logical conclusion as we hear a series of chimes, dings, and other sounds engaging in a sort of musical supercut. The idea here is evidently to dazzle the audioviewer not only with spectacle but its musical equivalent; throughout, audiovisual synch points occur so often it would perhaps be overly arduous to list them all. In nearly every scene, there’s a moment where the diegetic sound world and soundtrack coincide—whether it be a gun shot, rope breaking, knife thrown, or a slap to a face. What’s remarkable is just how consistent it is. Yet, in its wide range of sonic sources, it manages freshness—always evading a thoroughly predictable cadence of how frequent these synch points are, or where they come from. And all the while we are teased seemingly non-diegetic fragments of the jazz track ??, which is fully revealed—as is the diegetic party—at :39, the reveal of the director: the rest of the trailer keeps coming back to it as a unifying device for an otherwise bewildering visual narrative.

Babylon’s trailer provides ample evidence of the strengths that can come from a longtime director-composer partnership. Consider the potent combination of its memorable melodic motif, its playfulness with (non)diegetic sound, the use of synch points, or even playing with aspects of sound production and fidelity: This trailer convincingly delivers its impression of early Hollywood excess by delivering something that dazzles the eye and ear in equal measure. Babylon arrives in theatres in 2023.

— Curtis Perry