I think we can all agree that 2016 has been a decidedly crap year. In order to cleanse the palate of all that bitterness, then, run out and make the effervescent, infinitely satisfying La La Land one of the last things you do before ringing in 2017.
La La Land is a beautiful, sunshine-y bubble of a romance between would-be actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz purist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), and what happens to that fragile dream when reality and success start to seep in around the edges.
A contemporary musical is no small risk for Damien Chazelle, writer and director of Whiplash; the director screams his intentions from the rooftops — or in this case, a Los Angeles freeway — in the very first scene, wherein commuters stuck in a traffic jam end up doing a song-and-dance routine (“Another Day Of Sun”) atop their cars.
The freeway scene also provides the first inauspicious meeting between Seb and Mia, which ends not with a kiss but with one flipping the other the bird. The two keep bumping into each other: at a dingy jazz club (JK Simmons has a cameo as the piano-bar owner who fires Seb on Christmas Eve), at a schmoozy pool party, and at another party where Seb is mortified to be playing in an ’80s cover band.
All the while Mia works on a coffee shop on the B-lot and goes on auditions with dozens of women who look exactly like her, and Seb harbours fantasies of owning his own club while avoiding playing music in exactly the same way as everyone else. As seasons change (though the California sun shines on, comically) and their romance blossoms, success also enters the picture: Seb joins is old frenemy Keith (John Legend) on a sold-out jazz-rock tour while Mia is absorbed in her one-woman play.
The illusion is shattered somewhat by the appearance of Legend (also a producer on the film), and as our lovers’ relationship sags — as all passionate romances must — so too does the film, a downer after the exuberance of the first half, but a necessary evil for the purposes of the narrative.
True, Stone and Gosling are neither singers nor dancers, but both perform gamely and winsomely to the task in a film bathed in sherbet-coloured everything, and filled to the gills with joy, right down to fireworks and audience applause-worthy moments.
The film is bookended with the latter: the beginning has the freeway number but the end is a frenzied, whimsical, flash-back-and-forward, Technicolor musical montage of what-ifs and what-could-be’s that’ll leave you breathless, a little sad and wanting more.
“Why do you say romantic like it’s a dirty word?” asks the ever-idealistic Seb. La La Land is an intoxicating two-hour-long tonic after a very bad year, Chazelle’s one-man crusade to bring giddy romance back to the big screen.
La La Land is at the Park and Scotiabank.
