Todd McCarthy

F YOU’RE going to fall hard for Damien Chazelle’s daring and beautiful La La Land, it will probably be at first sight. There’s never been anything quite like the opening sequence: traffic is at a standstill on the high, curving ramp that connects the 105 freeway to the 110 leading to downtown LA.

Most of the cars are occupied by single drivers listening to different music. But after a moment, instead of just sitting there simmering, somebody gets out and starts singing and dancing. Soon someone else does the same. Then another, and yet another, until a bad mood has been replaced by a joyous one as the road becomes the scene for a giant musical production number set to an exuberant big-band beat.

Aside from wondering how the film-makers managed the logistics of pulling off such an audacious location shoot, lovers of classic musicals will be swept away by this utterly unexpected, original third feature from Damien Chazelle.

From a commercial point of view, the question is whether

Iyounger audiences will buy into it.

Only foreign-film connoisseurs of a certain age will realise that the writer-director’s true inspiration stems not as much from vintage Hollywood musicals (although allusions to them abound) as from the late French director Jacques Demy’s two landmark 1960s musicals with Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort – especially the latter, which was far more dance- and jazz-oriented. And while Chazelle’s breakthrough success two years ago with Whiplash also possessed a central, if eccentric, musical component, La La Land bears a much closer kinship with his mini-budgeted 2010 Harvard undergraduate feature Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench.

As did so many American musicals made before the mid1960s, this one pivots on a simple boy-meets-girl, fall-in-love scenario. Their “cute meet” takes place on the freeway. Actress Mia (Stone) works in a cute café on the Warner