GEMMA MAKING WAVES
Jury service: Gemma Arterton arrives by boat for the start of the Venice Film Festival today. The actress is a member of this year’s jury along with director Sam Mendes. The festival opened with La La Land, a musical starring Emma Stone as an aspiring actress opposite Ryan Gosling’s struggling musician
LA LA LAND is a monster musical, embracing ever y cliche about the hopes and frustrations of young talent in Hollywood as if they were all newly minted. It says: follow your dream, give it everything you’ve got, never stop.
It opens with a colossal song and dance number, about reaching for the heights and chasing all the lights that shine, as every driver jammed on the freeway bursts out of the stalled cars to celebrate another day of sun, a scene that won spontaneous applause even from jaded journalists in Venice today.
Whiplash, Damien Chazelle’s debut feature about an aspiring jazz drummer, opened Sundance in 2014 and went on to win a bunch of Oscars. Now he’s back, opening the 73rd Venice Film Festival with the big band version of the same story of making it against the odds.
Emma Stone is wannabe actress Mia, currently a barista; Ryan Gosling is Sebastian, a true jazz pianist, who wants to open his own club but has to play twaddle in bars (one managed by JK Simmons). After plenty of stand-offs and frustrated kisses, they get together and try to hold each other to their dreams.
Mia writes an unsuccessful onewoman play, Seb tours with a successful jazz-funk band that’s the opposite of everything he believes in. Mia ends up going home to Santa Fe saying it’s over, she’s done; Seb follows her to tell her she’s been called up by a casting director. “Maybe I’m not good enough?” “Yes, you are.”
If the dialogue signals broadly and the chemistry between Gosling and Stone isn’t always so hot, the film is, like Whiplash, brilliantly dance-like and weaving in its filming, while also being precisely edited to the very beat of the music that dominates it.
Lots of films lately have been made about Hollywood’s bad dreams (David C ronen berg’ s Maps To The Stars among them): now at last, here’s one that truly believes in stardom once more. OK, you have to be up for a bit of jazz — but the whole industry is going to love seeing itself glorified again, returned to the dreamy world of Singin’ In The Rain, not to mention The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, by such a young and vital believer as the 31year-old Chazelle.
The last original musical to take the Oscar was Gigi in 1959. La La Land could be starting on a long trail to glory of its own today. They don’t make films like this any more? He just did. La la!