Jazz and cinema have a visual splendour of a ballad written to them.
Wanting to follow a life-long dream is a marathon with a lot of hurdles along the way. Sometimes you might get lucky and reach that point without any problem. Other times you’ll trip up and fall flat on your face, losing all hope of ever attaining this golden vision of life you’ve held onto for so long. What truly matters is to have the people around you who keep your eyes fixed upon that aspiration. Life has a strange motion and a way of besmirching the purity of whatever dream you held, it makes you lose sight of what you wanted and twist it in such a way that the pit-stop which was originally meant to help you get to where you wanted becomes the final destination. Before long one forgets that they even dreamt in the first place until one small flash of memory stirred by the most random thing turns into a crisis of wistfulness and unbelonging.
The vision of this film isn’t quite that bleak however, but it does remind you of some of the sacrifices that’ll have to be made if you want to reach the top of your own ladder. It’s the sort of film which lays all the cards flat onto the table with mesmerising flight of hand. La La Land (2016) is an ode to jazz, the film industry, love and sacrifice all rolled into one. For those of you who may not have had the pleasure of watching this before, a jazz pianist, Seb, who dreams of opening his own pure jazz bar falls in love with an aspiring actress, Mia, and as they fall deeper in love and spend more time together, they are faced with the conflict of their dreams getting in the way of their relationship and the other way round, and must decide what must be done to save either their love or their aspirations. My girlfriend and I were mindlessly scrolling through Amazon Prime to fill in the empty hours before we leave this city forever, and as we happened upon La La Land, she expressed how she hadn’t seen it before and so we watched it. A little thing to note about my favourite person is that she has very little patience for long run-times, so often she won’t watch a long film at all or just quit halfway. On this occasion, she did the latter, looking up from time to time to see what new developments have occurred in the story. One thing is for certain, which is something that even made it past her steely determination to float away from the film, and that is how drop-dead gorgeous the visual makeup of this film is. Though her face was buried in her phone throughout the second half, her eyes would be drawn back up whenever the frame blossomed with the touch of a rainbow, which was most of the time. Very few films come close to not just how good this one looks, but also how well constructed and put together it is. Each dreamy detail – apart from one which I’ll get to later – is achieved with such fluid perfection, with such light-hearted whimsicality that it checks all the boxes of a good musical without being sickly sweet and overly saccharine.
This film could trade blows with a rainbow, that’s how vividly resplendent it is. I picked up some heavy inspiration from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) in this film, all the way from the set and costumes to the musicality. To avoid me going on a wild tangent of how fantastic that film is, I’ll save that for a review another day and just stick to the film at hand here. There’s something very sweet and pleasant about the blending of digital and celluloid filmmaking here, apart from the obvious need to not waste precious film on the grand clockwork-esque perfection dance sequences where there’s plenty of room for error, delineating a faint boundary between fantasy and reality, where real life becomes ever so slightly more grainy but truer in its subtle beauty than the clean and perfect fantasy of those musical numbers. With cinematography this good, it’s impossible to keep my eyes off the screen. Every little part of the set is washed with lovely colours that land softly upon the eye like a feather on the calm surface of water. Layered atop of that are the colourful costumes which complement the dazzling background with soft swaying movements of the garments. Every part of the colour spectrum is represented with excitement. Then there’s one part of the scene which is never out of view, never hidden or covered, and that’s the beautiful violet sky. Spreading across the vista above the electric starlight of the city, this painterly sky, which also feels like an ode to those expressionistic skies in Classical Hollywood, is the emotional canvas for the characters upon which their feelings dance invisibly, above the sight of light. With camerawork as impeccable as the character’s footwork, it’s pure rolling joy to see the camera fly through this dreamscape. There are more whip-pans than I can keep track of and I couldn’t be happier about that because there’s nothing livelier and more fun than a good whip-pan. During those larger musical numbers, the camera is handled with such precision as it moves like a flying dancer through the unfolding crowd. As I mentioned before, with so many individual parts moving around in erratic pleasure and all those sequences shot in a single take, the potential for error has a very high ceiling to fill, which makes me wonder how many takes it took to land the whole sequence.
There’s such fluid choreography, whether it’s between Seb and Mia or among larger groups as they’re dancing across a congested highway, and it’s a heightened delight to watch when all the visual pieces tie in together. They dance either in perfect unison or their movements flow into one another like a river into an ocean.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone quite wonderfully capture their characters stuck in that rut where their talents aren’t getting them anywhere, mostly because no one is giving them that chance to show themselves. Their romance comes together with antipathy for each other but the moment they realise they’ve fallen for each other, we do too via their nuanced performance of such a complex emotion. Some films favour the story over the filmmaking or the other way around, and even though the story in La La Land is quite simple, it’s executed with magical care.
When I first watched this film many years ago, I found that one scene where gravity takes a brief break and our two lovers start flying across a bed of stars a bit too much and ridiculous. I love all things outrageous but this one just felt a bit too much for me back then. I was anticipating this scene quite a lot this second time around as I was curious to see whether it’ll have a different effect on me, or if I’ll just be a bit more accepting of it. I wasn’t. I still feel like it doesn’t really contribute much to the development of their romance and if a scene like that was needed, it could’ve been done a lot better, at the very least as good as the rest of the movie around it. If the aim was expressionism, then it could’ve been achieved better than what they managed with some CG and a green-screen.
Regardless of that small criticism, the film is a joyous time from start to finish, pulling you in with an extravagant opening and gliding towards a bittersweet ending.
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