Genre: Musical/Romance
Opens: December 26, 2016
Duration: 127 minutes
2014’s Whiplash, a ferociously intense drama set in a US jazz conservatorium, announced writer-director Damien Chazelle as a major new talent and his follow-up film offers serious confirmation of this.
La La Land is an ambitious love letter to the great MGM musicals – a film where characters suddenly burst into song and break into dance, even floating into the sky at one point. It’s as bittersweet, entertaining and seductively romantic as its predecessor was dyspeptic.
At its heart are the romantic hopes and tribulations of two emblematically Los Angelenos, an impecunious jazz pianist – played by Ryan Gosling – and a struggling actor-cum-barista played by Emma Stone. While the stars’ singing voices and dancing are little more than passable, they compensate with ample charm and on-screen chemistry and are given splendid support from professional dancers, especially in a bravura opening traffic jam sequence in which frustrated commuters abandon the wheel to sing and dance around, and atop, their vehicles – all in a single extraordinary, sveltely executed camera move.
One minute in and I was bewitched. And from there it just kept on getting better.
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