Every so often – against all its better instincts – the film industry turns out a movie that essentially eulogises the act of film-making, and asserting its primacy in the collective imagination and fantasy. Correctly, Hollywood tends to police all this stuff rigorously, and only the high-end examples make it out to the wider world. Though its origins weren’t actual Hollywood, The Artist was the last film to really pull it off, and was rewarded with a bunch of Oscars for its troubles. And it’s looking increasingly likely that La La Land, a devout worshipper at the altar of the Hollywood musical, will go down the same path.
Suffused with a distinctive orange-purplish glow, La La Land self-consciously stakes out its place in the land of the waking dream. (Its title, too, is a hat-tip to the addled mindscape of the denizens of the city that houses Hollywood.) Writer-director Damien Chazelle deploys familiar elements from a wide variety of sources to create a sweet-sour confection. We all know Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling have that oh-so-precious spark of screen chemistry, so here they are as putative lovers in the city of angels. Everyone loves to see well-known actors showing off their singing and dancing chops, so here are Stone and Gosling hoofing and crooning up a storm. That bit in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You when Goldie Hawn floats up in the sky is universally beloved, so Chazelle engineers something similar in La La Land. The cumulative effect is intoxicating, as we follow the life paths of Gosling’s self-undermining jazz musician and Stone’s eager but tentative actor.
Can it be a coincidence that this fever dream of a film, with one foot in a fondly imagined past and another in a nervously awaited future, has emerged in the era of Trump, and America’s confrontation with its own darkest impulses? The hold that La La Land is currently exerting over audiences is at least partly to do with its function as a comfort blanket of yearning romanticism, inward-looking nostalgia and mournful retreat from the present. Whichever way you cut it, La La Land is a remarkable, distinctive film, and one that may come to define our era.
