Quarantine Black Movie Marathon Day 300: Babylon (1980)

On the day I post this, it has been almost exactly 300 days since I posted my first Quarantine Black Movie Marathon… so I missed a couple of days. Since I’m back in a 10 day quarantine after returning to Edinburgh for my masters , I thought I would throw out one or two more Black movie reviews in the spirit of everyone accepting that 2021 is really just 2020 with a fake mustache.

Recently, I had the pleasure of watching Franco Rosso’s 1980 film, Babylon. I had been meaning to watch this film for a while and, though I’m not sure what my exact expectations for this film were, they were undeniably exceeded. I loved this film. The script, the acting, the cinematography and, OF COURSE, the music all meshed so well together that I will probably be bobbing my head to reggae music only I can hear for weeks.

Around Christmas, I watched the second episode of Steve McQueen’s Small Ax— Lover’s Rock. While watching Babylon, I recognized the film’s influence on McQueen immediately. Despite the forty-year age difference, these films managed to touch the same spot of my little diaspora heart. An aspect I especially enjoyed in Lover’s Rock— although I’m not sure if it was intentional or not— stemmed from seeing young, familiar faces playing characters that would now be in their late 60s or early 70s. The inclusion of those faces— including Top Boy’s Michael Ward and Sex Education’s Kedar Williams-Stirling— evoked that very specific feeling when you see a picture of your parents or other older relatives at your age and are suddenly confronted with a spark of recognition and connection with what they may have been like in their youth. Babylon evoked a similar feeling even without the familiar faces. We often claim that old black films feel like they could have been made today and what I like about Babylon’s tenor stems from how the film can be relevant and touch on similar themes to modern black films, while still being set firmly within its time.

To my initial surprise, Babylon was both written and directed by white men. The distance between the creative team and the film’s central themes of race, class, and immigration calls to mind projects such as Top Boy, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and to a lesser extent Blindspotting (which was co-written by Daveed Diggs and his white creative partner Rafael Casal). On my typical post-movie google marathon, I came across a Rolling Stone article from 2019— the year that Babylon finally got a proper U.S. theatrical release. The article includes a quote from screenwriter Martin Stellman in which he reflects,

“We had credentials in terms of empathy … but we were tourists … And because we were tourists, we had to make sure everything in the movie was 100-percent copper-bottomed authentic. We’d be double checking the dialogue with my friends from the dancehall and they’d tell us, ‘Naw, they wouldn’t say that. That’s bollocks.’ They’d give us some better patois to use — it obviously wasn’t our thing.”

Though the film definitively focuses on the Black characters, the inclusion of a token white friend makes a lot more sense in the context of the production history and above quote. In a scene in which the group gets sabotaged by their white, National Front neighbors (a scene which I was on the edge of tears, I’ll admit), Beefy, a comical and volatile character played by Trevor Laird, turns his anger on their white friend, Ronnie (played by Karl Howman). Ronnie questions why Beefy would be upset with him as he has no connection to the racist neighbors; however, the film allows the viewer to empathize with Beefy, rather than using the scene to give Ronnie a “I’m different from other white people” moment. Despite the rest of the group members’ attempt to assuage Beefy, the group’s shared look of frustration and clear exhaustion from the constant harassment from their white neighbors validates Beefy’s anger. It’s also noteworthy that the film does not include how the event affects Ronnie after-the-fact— it simply choses to focus on the climax of Beefy’s (and the rest of the group’s) rising bitterness. Which leads me to my favorite part of the movie— the ending.

Without spoiling anything, the ending of this film flawlessly concludes the story while still leaving much to the unknown. In the same interview with Rolling Stone, Stellman talks about the two alternate endings to the film. While both would have been poignant, the ending they decided to settle on essentially allows for both endings to exist at once— letting the viewer decide what may have happened. In many other films, this kind of abrupt ending can be incredibly annoying; however, for some reason I felt perfectly content with where the film left me. It’s an ending I will probably never forget to a movie that deserves so much more hype.

10/10 would recommend, especially if you’ve seen Small Ax.

See you soon,

Sofia

Also check out:

The Long Goodbye : a short film accompanying Riz Ahmed’s latest album of the same name

Dizzie Rascal’s “Can’t Tek No More” which samples from Babylon’s final scene