I've only seen the trailer, but her anachronistic hair style it just too much. Hard to suspend disbelief and think this is the 1920s when she looks like she's straight out of the 2000s in every single scene.
shareLooks like she has that hair because her character is an actress playing in a period movie...
shareShe seems to be playing a sort of Clara Bow figure, the uneducated nobody from the Bronx who became the party girl of the century when she hit the big time. Bow had wild hair by the standards of the time.
https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.3bc0f4c03cbd6b8ae3e2fd6146582ad4?rik=FtjHIqhkUJNSNw&pid=ImgRaw&r=0
However, that hair there is NOT 1920s hair! Girls either cut it short or grew it long and put it up in a carefully styled updo, they didn't grow it long and wear it loose (and filthy). Sure, a party girl might have long hair that she normally put up and which came down and got sweaty at parties, but it's long, loose, and sweaty in every single clip of her! SO not period!
They make period movies full of anachronisms on purpose so things will seem familiar to modern, uneducated audiences and they won't feel threatened by something they aren't used to.
shareHollywood has always done this, or almost always done this. There have been some exceptions over the last few decades, but mostly Hollywood makes films to appeal to modern audiences who have only the vaguest idea of what people wore in the past. Over most of Hollywood's history, a person can look at a "historical" film, and easily pinpoint the era in which it was made by looking at the anachronisms.
Which is why when I want an English-language historical film, I find something made by the BBC! THEY get it right, across the pond!
It's not just her hair, even the hair of the other women at that time. Like you said, their hair was either short or long but styled short so the front would be cut short and put up to resemble a bob. Her outfit and outfits of the other women looked very 90s and 00s to me. No one wore stockings, the makeup and eyebrows are all off, etc. Black tie suits were long tail and they all wore modern black tie suits. They even made this a big deal in Sunset Blvd and that was set in the 50s. Their language is also very very very modern.
Bessie Love had the same hair stye. Also, she wore a pair of overalls with nothing underneath like Robbie did in the snake fight scene. You should be able to find a pic of her in the overalls with a Google image search.
shareWell, I just looked through a bunch of photos of Bessie Love, and I found very few in which she looked like Margot Robbie's character, and certainly not during the pre-code era (my understanding that this is when the film is supposed to take place...sometime between 1929-1934).
shareI found several photos of Bessie supposedly taken throughout the 1920s, which are the years you originally mentioned. She had long curly hair in enough of them for me to see that she is at least one of the actresses they were modeling Robbie's character after. The naked under the overalls photo is the smoking gun, IMO. Obviously, Bessie changed her hairstyle over the years, but Robbie kept hers the same throughout the whole movie. It would've been more fitting if she had updated her hair as the film progressed. See pics 1, 7, 23, 24, & 38....https://www.vintag.es/2016/11/bessie-love-innocent-flapper-of.html?m=1
shareWhat's interesting though is that one of the directors/producers listed the women that the character was modeled after, and he didn't mention Bessie Love. In any case, even in those photos you showed, you can clearly see Love with bobbed hair in most of them, as well as water waves in some, and cloche hats. I think it's that in all the clips from Babylon, Margot Robbie has the same basic hairstyle. While some overlap in hairstyles between today and the past is expected, to have it occur throughout the film seems rather....anachronistic.
shareYeah, we agree that Robbie should've updated her hairstyle throughout the movie. That would've been more realistic for the times.
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