Damien Chazelle
La La Land

From my blog.

I am a big fan of Whiplash. Now it would be really easy to say that La La Land is a very overrated film, a movie that received many Oscar nominations because it is technically flawless but not so artistically stunning. And indeed, I won't say it: I liked it, I left the theater humming the main tune, I laughed and I wondered many times where Chazelle was heading. In the end, the answer came, more or less, and it highlighted its very close continuity with the theme of Whiplash. La La Land is the civil, romantic, bourgeois version of Whiplash, which was something wild, neurotic, adolescent.

If you will, the relationship between artistic, musical, but this time not only, journey and life is unraveled even better in this work; there is more space for these themes, but also less freshness. Thus, the love problems that arise between the two protagonists are really not very intriguing, while the wounds caused by music in the life of the young drummer in the previous film were more expendable at a cinematic level. The consequences, however, are better explored here: following two paths like those of Mia and Seb gives greater richness from this point of view. The need to sacrifice a bit of oneself for art gets its seal in one of the final sequences when Seb imagines how everything would have gone if there had been no desire to do great things in music and acting. With this precious seal, Chazelle completes his discourse on this topic a bit. And he does it really well, in his style, without explaining the obvious but also always leaving something unsaid, asking the viewer to ponder it a little.

La La Land is a film made to please, undeniably. This can be a limit, but one must recognize great craftsmanship in the work of tailors, set designers, and various technicians. The colors, the clothes, the lights, the scenic spaces: it's all a symphony, a kaleidoscope. However, there is no real peculiar cut to this prerogative, as there may be in Wes Anderson's films. Here, the goal is simply to intoxicate the audience, with a linear summation of beautiful things. And among these, how could we not mention the two protagonists, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone: two magnets that shift attention and, along with the songs, make one overlook a certain rarefaction in the structure of the plot.

The story is very simple, but that’s not the problem. On the contrary, the time jumps and the stylization are appreciable choices; we are not interested in everything being contiguous in a musical and in cinema in general, quite the opposite. The problem is rather how these spaces left free by the loose mesh of the diegesis are filled. And so, we arrive at songs and choreographies, which do not always convince. Or rather, the diegetic songs, present in the story because they are actually sung and played during the unfolding events, well, those are great. From jazz pieces to Seb's band songs, from poolside concerts at private parties to the initial pianobar sonatas. Less convincing are the proper musical songs, the metanarrative ones, which insert themselves into the realistic fabric and suspend it for a while. Some are beautiful, certainly, but others seem just to prolong the broth with smooth sounds lacking lively cues. Overall, there are many pleasant moments, but we are far from excellence.

Something is also amiss in the dialogues and the construction of the second-degree narratives: a screenwriter proves to be skilled when he knows how to write even fragments of theatrical monologues within his film, or narrate an audition without necessarily using a song. The lyrics of the songs, even those, did not particularly impress me, but at least they were not dubbed.

6.5/10