FILM OF THE WEEK
La La Land
Cert: 12A; Now showing
Be gone, 2016, and with you the ills of falling stars and rising monsters you gave us. 2017 kicks off with something delirious in its romantic wonderment that has just steam-rolled the Golden Globes with a record haul of seven wins.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Like The Artist (2011), La La Land is an all-singing, all-dancing love letter to classier times. Damien Chazelle’s rendering of Los Angeles takes the lighter notes of digital-era melancholy and washes them in Golden-Age pizazz and old-school values. Like Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014), jazz provides the beat while technology is a distant buzzkill. Into these comely confines waltz picture-perfect Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (their third screen outing together, after Gangster Squad and Crazy, Stupid, Love). Just detectable over Justin Hurwitz’s lush score are the Academy silverbacks already swooning.
Once the hysterical — and slightly off-putting — opening extravaganza is done, things settle down. Stone is Mia, a struggling actress working in a film-studio cafe. Sebastian (Gosling) is a pianist whose passion won’t be tempered by shifts as a restaurant ivory-tinkler.
The two Cinderellas cross paths via colourful coincidences before love blossoms to the sound of tapping feet and charming duets. Love, alas, is just another dream to vie with Mia’s bigscreen ambitions and Sebastian’s goal to open a jazz club.
While better than anything from his recent run of so-so performances, Gosling is still largely acted off the screen by Stone who doesn’t put a figurative or literal foot wrong.
Despite being such a stylised venture, Chazelle aims to conjure an adorable, pungent and bittersweet universe, and hits his target.