‘La La Land’ puts a song in your heart
A boy, a girl, a bench and a plum-coloured sunrise still working magic
(10) LA LA LAND
Directed by: Damien Chazelle; Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, John Legend, Josh Pence, Finn Wittrock, JK Simmons. (Walmer Park)
Reviewed by: Robbie Collin
IF YOU’VE only just heard about La La Land, you may be wondering what all the song and dance is about. But if you’ve been tracing its trajectory for a while, you’ll know that song and dance is the whole idea.
The delectable new film from Damien Chazelle – winner of seven Golden Globes, recipient of 11 Bafta nominations, and the expected winner of the 89th Academy Award for Best Picture – is a musical. And not just any old musical, but the twirling, soaring kind that was last in style in the ’60s heyday of Jacques Demy, when Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac swished down sun-drenched boulevards in sorbet-coloured minis, trilling jazz-pop numbers that imprint themselves on your heart in one go.
Chazelle captures that spirit and releases it into the wilds of present-day Los Angeles.
Old Hollywood is where the movie musical first flourished, after all and though its golden age may be long gone, the film has faith that a boy, a girl, a bench and a plum-coloured sunrise are still capable of working their magic.
The boy in question is Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a passionate jazz pianist with a half-formed but wholehearted ambition to open a club of his own and defend his favourite music from extinction.
And the girl is Mia (Emma Stone), a gifted aspiring actress who flits between fruitless auditions and a coffee shop till on the Warner Bros studio lot.
All that each of them needs is an opportunity. What they find is each other. Whether or not the latter of those things can make up for the absence of the former is the big question on La La Land’s mind, and the answer isn’t as glib as you might expect.
Behind the film’s nimble comedy and exuberant musical set-pieces beats a complex, crisply written romance, the power of which creeps up on you slowly then strikes in the film’s second half, in which Sebastian and Mia’s ambitions and relationship become increasingly tricky to reconcile.
Once you’ve waltzed through the stars the only way is down.
But everyone in La La Land is wrestling with ambition. In the opening number attractive young hopefuls spill out of their cars in an impregnable traffic jam, and sing about the city’s show-business heritage, and the grit it takes to even try to measure up to it.
Their enthusiasm level borders on manic, and the song’s title – Another Day of Sun – is repeated over and over, like an insistently chipper knock-knock-knock on an agent’s door that just won’t open.
Both Stone and Gosling – who’ve made a convincing screen couple twice before, in Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad – are so attuned to each other’s pace and flow that their repartee just seems to tumble out, perfectly formed.
Perhaps hardest of all, they make it look easy.
It’s true their singing and dancing won’t trouble Fred and Ginger’s legacy. But on a second viewing, I realised it’s not supposed to: even at its most heightened, there’s a spontaneity, even casualness, to the way La La Land carries itself that feels both moving and genuine.
It makes you realise Chazelle isn’t just an astute trend-spotter, but the real creative deal – and that La LaLand, far from being mere pastiche, is fit to stand alongside the very cinematic landmarks it reveres. – The Telegraph