La La Land

Directed By: Damien Chazelle Written By: Damien Chazelle Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K Simmons

There is a scene in La La Land, Damien

Chazelle’s effervescent musical dramedy, in which Emma Stone’s character Mia privately performs her one woman show for her new beau Sebastian (played by Ryan Gosling.) She performs in a softly lit, shoebox of a bedroom, and afterwards she expresses reservations regarding how nostalgic the whole thing threatens to be. “That’s exactly the point!” Sebastian reasons. “But what if people don’t like it?” “Fuck ‘em!”

One gets the impression that Damien Chazelle has played out this very exchange in his own head, that the writer/director had similar anxieties and arrived at the same brilliantly assured and hilariously blunt rebuttal to anticipated criticisms. It’s a confession of sorts, La LaLand doesn’t just wear its endearment for Hollywood’s Astaire/Rogers tandems and classic musicals from some seventy years prior on its sleeve, but it tattoos it on its forehead. It’s a film steeped in nostalgia, an exercise in it, for a genre seemingly taken off life support decades ago. It’s a venture which risks the unfortunate symptom of prohibiting the film from ever finding its own identity, but La La Land contradicts itself seamlessly and gracefully; a love letter for the past anchored in the techy, bustling world of today, where everyone drives a Prius and 80s music is still the lamest. It casts very much its own spells and finds its own notes, through an extraordinary visual verve, a quaint yet poignant soundtrack, and effortlessly luminous chemistry between its performers. Yes La La Land is a tribute, but it’s indelible on its own terms, shattering the apparent confines of pastiche by painting with glowing colours, both literally and intangibly.

Peculiarly, Chazelle’s newest film finds itself the sibling of the director’s star making vehicle from 2014, the utterly bruising Whiplash. The two films are seldom recognisable in their tone and style (Whiplash borders on the barbaric, La La Land champions a joyful optimism) but they find common thematic ground in their exploration of artistic passion and the drive required to fulfil it. The approach threatens to be twee, but Chazelle keeps himself in check with a real-world perceptibility and an earnest love for his subjects that grows infectious. It’s the affection that courses through LaLa Land that allows it to glow so strikingly, an affection not only appreciated, but demanded by a story of two people loving each other and loving the industries they aspire to be in.

Those people

are of course floundering jazz pianist Sebastian (who dreams of owning his own club,) and equally floundering actress Mia (who’s currently stuck working as a barista on a Warner Bros. lot.) Both have been chewed up and spat out by LA, but heroically they cling to their aspirations regardless. They meet not-so-cute on two occasions, once in a traffic jam which eventually erupts into the film’s opening sunny number, and secondly at a restaurant from which Sebastain has just been fired for improvising over the Christmas carols he’s been brought in to monotonously play. The third time they do meet cute and fall in love. They’re both passionate, quick witted and bold, but above all it is their status as tireless dreamers that unites them. Yet La La Land is much more than an ode to dreamers, it’s a study of reconciling dreams with reality, where even those who take residence in the dream factory must one day wake up. It’s a sobered portrait of compromise as, what may have been a sappy mosaic of happiness, instead has its eyes and ears tuned to the waking reality of adulthood; a deft balancing act of the fantastical and the real that Chazelle confidently negotiates, at once celebrating his characters for their pining, and challenging them with the pragmatism required to survive in the waking world. It’s a tasking reconciliation process for Mia and Sebastian cleverly reflected in passages of artistry and fantasy being ruptured by the contemporary world rearing its head; Mia’s auditions are invariably marred by casting agents having one eye on their phone; song and dance numbers are too cut short by the interference of dreaded smart phones; and, on their first date, Mia and Sebastian have a moment of romance quashed by the faltering of that same bygone art that Chazelle and his characters so cherish, as an old-school movie projector conks out mid screening. One senses that this dream/reality impasse has a more reflexive function also, signalling Chazelle slapping himself across the face, reigning himself in from his charmed, nostalgic preoccupations, simply because life demands it.

Gosling and Stone are perfect in their roles, each evoking the charisma and built-in warmth of Hollywood’s greats from the 40s and 50s. They may not be Astaire and Rogers, but one can easily imagine the two having strolled in from the set of Swing Time or even Singing in the Rain regardless. They are movie stars in the most complimentary way, alluring, attractive and sympathetic, the fabric of the town at the film’s heart. Their greatest accomplishment as a tandem is the sincerity of their romance. In an age of cynicism, it’s difficult to be earnest and romantic at the same time, but so mesmerising are the performances, so dire is our need to see Mia and Sebastian succeed, that La La Land never has to confront the stickiness of tackling potentially treacle subject matter. The story may sound slender, but to steal a line from Roger Ebert, a film isn’t about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about it. It’s the joyousness and

whimsy with which their romance is performed and communicated; through whirling dance routines, through irresistibly vibrant music, through effortless cool and unbridled heartiness, that brings La La Land to life, that allows it to transcend any simplicities. It boasts a popping colour palette and enchantingly slick choreography as its pillars, the latter of which Chazelle observes with long, fluid tracking shots, the protracted takes allowing the magic to be experienced without intrusion, imploring the viewer to really look at the onscreen world. It’s addition by subtraction, where Chazelle’s economy in editing allows the visuals to wash over you, to heighten your appreciation of them, and to allow the romance between Gosling and Stone to truly materialise. And yet there are flourishes of that hectic cutting that delivered Tom Cross, returning from Whiplash, his Best Editing Oscar from 2015, segments of frenetic splicing bearing a jazzy energy all of its own.

Between Whiplash, Chazelle’s debut feature Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, and now La La Land, it may appear the director has eyes for merely one subject, content to play in an isolated corner of the sandbox where he can exercise his passion to reingratiate the world with the magic of bygone art. But it is the varying energies Chazelle is able to instil into his films that defines them. Where Whiplash was ferocious, La La Land is warm; where Guy and Madeline was mumblecore, La La is fantastical. With his latest, Chazelle has secured himself as an auteur with distinct emotional range, a transfixing teller of embellished yet measured stories whose passion one can feel seeping through the lens. “People love what other people are passionate about” Mia tells Sebastian; Chazelle has proven himself right.

Rating:

4/4