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Both a thoroughly modern musical and one that leans heavily on the genre's history, DamienCfeazeUe's film is an unselfconsciously joyfull homaqe-to-moving pictures. jazz music and Los Angeles. As ANTHONY CAREW finds, it is also a film with much to say about life's hopes and thwarted ambitions, and about letting go of the past.
La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016) is most famous - at least for the near future, if not forever - for its defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory Oscars loss, a moment of such off-script surprise and drama that it turned the 89th Academy Awards into something resembling a sports movie, with plucky underdog Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) triumphing in unbelievable, at-the-buzzer fashion. Having won five BAFTAs, seven Golden Globes and - earlier that night - six Academy Awards, La La Land was fully expected to win the Oscars' climactic prize, Best Picture. But in an upset made infamous by an all-time gaffe - the wrong envelope handed to presenters, the wrong film title read out, the wrong winners coming on stage - it lost, only after its makers had started delivering acceptance speeches.
Before it lived on in memed infamy1 as unlikely loser, La La Land was a sure success: critically beloved, financially successful, sweeping through the awards season. Chazelle made it at just thirty-one years of age, following on from his 2014 psychodrama Whiplash, a grim portrait of sadism and machismo in the world of jazz schools. La La Land was the film he'd wanted to make all along, though. Ever since his debut film, 2009's Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a micro-budget jazz musical staged for his senior thesis project at Harvard University, Chazelle had dreamt of fashioning a big-screen, big-budget musical.2
The musical is a genre forever associated with Hollywood history, musicals the definitive form of mainstream movie entertainment in cinema's early days of sound. Anyone making a modern-day screen musical is, whether they want to be or not, involved in a dialogue with the past, charged with an act of revivalism. Every screen musical is made into a commentary on the state of its genre, in a way that a dramatic narrative or documentary feature is not.
La La Land is, in turn, a work steeped in the past,...