“La La Land”
La La Land is a ludicrous and a laborious film. It’s the work of
Damien Chazelle, who previously gave us the grotesque sadomasochistic
psychodrama Whiplash, and plays as
ineptly on the subjects of music, musicians, art, and artistry as that earlier
film did. Where the two leading figures in Whiplash
were each a pile of clichés working tirelessly on performances of mediocre jazz
numbers, the two leads in La La Land
are empty shapes painted in bright artificial colours and emoting through unexceptional
Broadway poperatic ballads. The film is explicitly a tribute to the
plastic-coloured musical reveries that sprang up in the 50s and 60s, during the
final great blast of energy at the death of the classical Hollywood system; a mixed
bag of overt allusions is made to Singin’
in the Rain, Funny Face, Top Hat, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and other films. But Chazelle – though he
works frightfully hard for it, and though that labour shows on the screen –
does not have the sensibility of style and of wonder that made each of the
works he obviously loves so memorable.
The trouble starts in the very
first shot, which turns out to be a long tracking shot that appears to last for
at least five minutes, right through the opening number, “Another Day of Sun”.
In it, a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway turns into a song and dance
routine. Drivers dressed in monochrome pastel colours jump out of and leap over
their cars, mugging chaotically for the restless camera.
A show is made of the tracking shot and how well-timed, well-placed, and
well-coordinated are each of the dancers, yet the impression given is not of the
geometric precision of sequences in classic musicals such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or 42nd
Street, but of the strenuous work and rehearsal that went into it. The dancers’ beaming smiles don’t
evoke the joy of performance and of artifice, but preen at their technical
achievement and conspicuous exertions. The self-satisfied multiculturalism of this opening scene feels contrived and then insulting as it yields to the
whites-only love story of the film.