Recencies van critici

Chazelle makes sure we can see Gosling and Stone in full when they dance, right away proving he's a better director than Baz Luhrmann or Rob Marshall. But when Sebastian complains about the dumbness of a tapas restaurant that's also a samba club, Chazelle sets up a problem for his film that lesser directors spare themselves in their egregiousness. He raises the question of why people love crap, then answers it by making the kind of crap people love.

I enjoyed watching the movie quite a bit, and at this very moment I am listening to the melancholy song at the movie's heart ("City of Stars"), and I am enjoying that experience as well, because the song is good; I am also, at one and the same time, loathing myself because the movie is loathsome. And that is a weird position to be in. And that is what I want to talk about.

For Chazelle, "Another Day of Sun" functions as "a warning sign to people in the audience. If people are not going to be comfortable with it, they'll leave right away." La La Land thus almost dares audiences to accept and celebrate this unrealistic cinematic convention, and for a 21st century musical, that's a somewhat rare approach to take.

The film's allusion to Rear Window, for instance, may encourage audiences to compare the onscreen chemistry between Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling to that of Grace Kelly and James Stewart. To catch these subtle references, filmgoers need to pay close attention to the camerawork, the staging, the costumes, and even the choreography. Similarly, we can discover new layers of meaning by analyzing its songs and their sound designs.

For me, La La Land‘s references to classical Hollywood musicals and to the films of Jacques Demy provide a major source of its pleasure. (Sara Preciado's video essay demonstrates the film's homages) The film's nods to other traditions remind us of something about the relationship between Hollywood and other national cinemas: mutual influence is the norm.

Damien Chazelle's La La Land has turned out to be a fascinatingly divisive film. It has enchanted thousands and swept up a record 14 Oscar nominations. It is – I will readily admit – not without its pleasures. But I nevertheless found myself troubled by it in many ways. My "issues" with it fall into six broad categories. (Sorry – this movie pushed several of my buttons!)

It's a white male American dream, a story where the alternate version of what happened to the characters is just as persuasive and powerful, and a lot more glamorous, than what we just saw happening. It's La La Land. My mistake was in thinking that this was a made-up world. But we are living in La La Land. It deserves to win bigly at the Oscars: until we all wake up, this is the Best Picture we deserve.

The slimness of the plot can be taken as a point against the film, but focusing a musical so tightly on the couple was probably worth trying. If anybody cares, I enjoyed the film, and—to invoke the distinction between taste and judgment—I think it's a solid, sometimes stirring effort. But what matters to me now is the way that thinking about craft traditions, particularly as they affect structure, allows us to plot some ways in which La La Land is both traditional and original.

It asks us to truly empathise with Seb and Mia's dreams of making it big, zero irony involved. Compared with the blank pastiche of films such as Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Chicago (2002), which approach the perils and promises of fame in a knowing play of surfaces, La La Land sentimentally resurrects the démodé genre of the musical for its wholesome hopefulness and choreographed joy. After postmodernism's much-touted waning of affect, here sincerity is on the rise.

It's not about asking one poor, defenseless little Best Picture front-runner to solely bear the weight of systemic industrial issues so much as examining what is suggested by its near-consensus standard-bearer status. And if the best that can be said is that it's no worse than most other American movies in this regard, let's just say that I've seen better reasons for celebration.

Chazelle's camera spins and twists and cranes with showy, athletic mobility. But the showiness of the camerawork is overtly strenuous, technique without actual purpose, distracting from the fact that what it's filming isn't actually very well staged or choreographed; it is in fact rather a hymn to its own existence, a "wow, can you believe I'm pulling this in 2016?" statement.

There's an undeniable bluntness to Chazelle's film, a need to hector and pummel the viewer into submission with an aggressive aesthetic of nostalgia... La La Land is the kind of journey-back-in-time escapism that makes dissenters seem like ingrates. It offers undeniable craft, but also brilliantly strategized messaging, flattering its audience for being part of the chosen few who get it.