After the triumph of Whiplash, Damien Chazelle went to explore once again the tenuous links between art and the theme of dreams. The result is La La Land, a film full of elegance and delicacy that is a vibrant tribute to the musical (and the Umbrellas of Cherbourg by J.Demy); worn for the occasion by a duo of actors (Ryan Gosling / Emma Stone) totally in phase. Masterly!
He (Ryan Gosling) is a penniless pianist, convinced that jazz is in its final hours. She (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress who, between two Starbucks coffees, skims the auditions in search of the role that will launch her permanently. In the middle, the City of Angels, beautiful, colorful, intoxicating like an Eden, playing the role of the place, like Disney productions, where everything is possible. Under the scope of Damien Chazelle, they will fall in love, both charmed to find in the other this same dreamer espousing the vision (dear to the director) of what is passion for an art: an everyday struggle that ends up mutating even if it means transcending itself by the sole determination of the one who indulges in it. Because basically, this is the main challenge of La La Land : not to revive a genre that has been subjected to agony for too long – the musical – but to summon, moreover in a city disguised as a living symbol of cinematographic art, this struggle led by anyone who has ever tried to live from his passion.
In search of happiness
And where one might have thought in a representation as carnivorous as that of Whiplash, who has never spared himself the care of zooming in on the bloodied thumbs and dressed with bandages, La La Land takes the tangent. First by its opening scene, which in only ten minutes illustrates, like a manifesto of what will be the whole, the whole process of Damien Chazelle: to summon the current, the present and detect in its flaws, the obvious beauty, of the kind that touches the eye suddenly. Clearly, to grasp the beautiful in the filthy, joy in misfortune, hope in despair, perseverance in failure… For this, what better than to seize a traffic jam (subtle image reminiscent of what Los Angeles is for all artistic souls in search of success) where several pieces of music from all horizons collide? Not much actually. Chazelle, well helped by his petaradant style (he is promised a bright future) launches hostilities and clicks. Without warning, the drivers then push the song and transform the tarry strap into an improvised dance hall where only the grace, the horns and the simplicity of a choreography where the hoods of the cars have replaced the chairs of the music halls.
La La Land or the perfect antithesis of Whiplash
From this resolutely optimistic postulate, Chazelle, who we feel sailing by sight, triggers the second and comes to pervert his model. It does not take much time to understand that he has once again brought a part of him back to the party and given birth to a film that brews as much on the side of pure tribute as the attempt to exorcise his own memories. A bold mix that has the merit of making us understand above all, how the young director that he is, managed to make his way and avoid all the pitfalls of the genre while emerging victorious. Because like Whiplash, La La Land talks about passion but mostly about him. The reality of the environment in which he evolves today as a master. He, once the poor drummer who had to suffer martyrdom under the aegis of a tyrannical teacher and who told us the vagaries of his musical life, comes out here the same recipe: that of his arrival in Hollywood and his fight to live from his passion. Good player, he gives way to Ryan Gosling, dressed as a melancholic pianist and very down to earth to tell the rest; that of a story where beauty (hello Emma Stone) and ugliness (the harshness of the acting world) mingle dominated by the fight that makes the salt of the feature film: that between passion (here also comparable to dream) in the face of reality. In this sense, it is difficult not to see in La La Land, a kind of continuity in Whiplash. When Whiplash tended to show the painful odyssey of a drummer ready to compromise to reach the heights and who lost his superb as the minutes ticked by, La La Land conveys an elegant opposite direction by deploying through a staging of indecent beauty, this same fight tinged this time with hope. This is basically the message of La La Land : to transmit, even inculcate in a film that prefers beauty to didacticism that dreams are a great escape from real life and that with a little audacity, combativeness and above all hope, they can become reality.
Subtle, melancholic, bitter and yet magnificent, La La Land is of that caliber of film that makes you love cinema and gives hope. In other words, a rare commodity in all Hollywood and which deserves as such, the rain of dull praise it has been the subject of.
Trailer: La La Land
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyBl7WpSch0
