You will have registered the buzz surrounding La La Land and clocked its seven Golden Globe wins and 11 Bafta nominations. However, I know you won’t believe it’s wonderful unless you hear it directly from me, so here you are: it’s wonderful. Mostly. It’s wonderful, with a few caveats. I feel bad about the caveats but if you have caveats and repress them, it can make you quite ill in later years. Best to get them out there. But just so we’re clear: La La Land with caveats is still more wonderful than almost anything else.
It is written and directed by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), who grew up loving old-style romantic musicals, even if that was only ten minutes ago (he is 31, goddammit). Shot in Cinemascope and using gloriously saturated colours — yellow will have never seemed so yellow — this is an old-style romantic musical that also pays homage. American in Paris, The Band Wagon, Oklahoma!, Funny Face, A Star is Born, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (particularly) — there are nods to them all. And it opens spectacularly, with a traffic jam on the LA freeway that turns into a single-take song-and-dance number as bored commuters abandon their cars and cartwheel over bonnets to a tune — caveat alert! — with lyrics I couldn’t make out for the life of me. But it’s deliciously choreographed and provides an opportunity for the first meet-cute between Mia (Emma Stone, who is 87 per cent eyes) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling, 100 per cent a dish). This happens when, back in the jam, he beeps at her, and she gives him the finger. Oh no! They hate each other! Calamity! Of course, we know they’ll eventually fall in love, because this is the trope that’s the trope of tropes, and we’re mad for this trope.
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