Damien Chazelle’s sun-drenched musical is even lovelier on second viewing, while Casey Affleck’s janitor evokes Brando
Stunningly losing the best picture Oscar may turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to La La Land (Lionsgate, 12), Damien Chazelle’s sun-bright, sour-sweet satsuma of a musical. Formally released from the prestige pressure bestowed by such a title, the film that inspired such a hysterical pre-Oscar backlash as to be labelled “fascist propaganda” in certain quarters of the internet can be cherished once more as the bijou beauty it is – a film out not to change the world, but to wistfully warm it up a little. Stylistically riffing on Jacques Demy and Stanley Donen with frisky magpie cheek, Chazelle’s picture is steeped in nostalgia, but not just of the gilded “they don’t make ’em like they used to” variety. Its simple, starry-eyed boy-meets-girl story deals in emotional nostalgia too, mistily marking the romantic highs, errors of the heart and intractable influence of fate on a single love affair.
Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is the musician fixated on recreating the past, while Mia (Emma Stone) is the actress with an eye to the future. As they move backwards and forwards, respectively, along the Hollywood travelator, the question is how long the lovers can remain within sight of each other. This isn’t the huge, iridescent heartbreak of vintage melodrama; Chazelle and his kinetically connected leads play it both gentler and cooler than that, in a story about the love that sometimes blossoms, and sometimes wilts, in the cracks of other, bigger dreams.
Continue reading…
Source: Guardian
