Oscar glory predicted for romantic, nostalgic La La Land

The Venice Film Festival has kicked off with a glowing homage to the golden age of Hollywood. Nicholas Barber sees big things in store for La La Land.

“Why do you say ‘romantic’ like it’s a dirty word,” splutters Ryan Gosling’s character, Sebastian, in Damien Chazelle’s razzle-dazzling musical, La La Land. Later, Emma Stone’s character, Mia, is fretting about a play she is writing. “It feels really nostalgic to me,” she says. “That’s the point,” fires back Sebastian.

So there we have it. Chazelle’s follow-up to the acclaimed Whiplash is knowingly romantic and defiantly nostalgic. It doesn’t care if it gets a few cynical reactions, it’s a big-hearted, full-throated tribute to Technicolor movies, old-time jazz, and the notion that living your dreams is the only way to live. In a year when the Berlin Film Festival began with the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, and Cannes kicked off with Woody Allen’s Cafe Society, the Venice Film Festival opens with a third glowing homage to the golden age of Hollywood - and it outshines both of the others.

Not that La La Land is set in the 1940s or '50s. After a teasing black-and-white opening caption, the film switches suddenly to colour, and drops us into the middle of a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway. In separate cars, the drivers sit and fume and listen to separate songs, but then things miraculously change. First one driver leaves her car and starts singing, then another and another, until there are dozens of people crooning and dancing joyously together, captured by the roving camera in one unbroken take. At the screening I attended, this bravura sequence received a round of applause, and deservedly so. As well as being tremendous fun and a technical triumph, it tells us what kind of film to expect: a musical that’s set in the exasperating present day, but which has its heart in the harmonious past.

Two of the people who stay in their cars during the traffic jam are Mia and Sebastian. Mia, we learn, is an aspiring actress who sleeps in her shared apartment beneath a wall-filling poster of Ingrid Bergman. She moved to Hollywood years ago, but the closest she’s got to the movie business is working in a Warner Bros backlot canteen, and auditioning unsuccessfully for inner-city soap operas. (Best audition line: “No, Jamal - you be trippin’!”) Sebastian is just as far from where he wants to be. A jazz obsessive, he longs to open a nightclub where he can improvise on the piano while wearing tailored three-piece suits, but instead he has to plod through Christmas songs in a restaurant whose owner is so stern that he’s played by JK Simmons. The pair’s frustrations are established in some very funny, snappily written scenes before Mia and Sebastian finally meet and realise that they would be a lot less frustrated together.

The film follows their lives through four seasons of a single year - not that you can tell the seasons apart in Los Angeles. The plot is as paper-thin as a Valentine’s card, but that leaves room for Chazelle to cram La La Land with all sorts of other delights, from the ice-cream-sundae colours to the magical flights of fancy to the fond portrayal of LA as a place with history, beautiful views, and inhabitants who sometimes walk instead of driving everywhere. Best of all are the whistle-able songs composed by Justin Hurwitz, with polished lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, even if none of the subsequent musical numbers has the pizzazz of the traffic-jam opener. But what keeps the film floating along is its updraft of, yes, romance and nostalgia. As postmodern as it is, La La Land is sincerely smitten by music and the movies. 

Maybe it’s a little too smitten. Chazelle is so eager to tip his trilby to Rebel Without a Cause, Singin’ in the Rain, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and countless other films that he almost forgets to make a new film of his own - although, again, this shortcoming is archly addressed in the dialogue. Besides, whenever La La Land appears to be nothing more than an accomplished pastiche, it’s lent some humanity by its leads’ performances. Gosling and Stone are nowhere near Fred and Ginger when it comes to singing and dancing, but they’re within spitting distance when it comes to charisma and chemistry. Most cinema-goers are already madly in love with at least one of them, and that love will hit stratospheric new heights when they see how skilfully Gosling and Stone balance their absurd attractiveness with goofy self-deprecation in La La Land.

Indeed, Seb and Mia are so adorable together that Chazelle has trouble prising them apart when the film reaches the inevitable falling-out phase of proceedings. Having built up their relationship exquisitely, he kicks it apart clumsily: he pushes them into an argument which makes no sense, and forces one of them to undergo a personality switch that Dr Jekyll might consider a bit extreme. 

But this hurried and unsatisfying interlude is the only off-key note in a film, which will have happy audiences humming its tunes and singing its praises. It’s worth ing that the last two best picture winners at the Oscars, Spotlight and Birdman, both premiered at Venice. Don’t be surprised if La La Land makes it three in a row.

★★★★★

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