La La Land: Where Dreams May Come
By filming a musical, you can either create a masterpiece for the ages, or fail miserably. This simple cinematic axiom was tested on his own skin by Rob Marshall, first, as expected,"with style, brilliance"directed the crime comedy "Chicago", and then twice in milk with the tapes "Nine" and " The further into the forest ... ". His successor, who took on an unpopular genre today, could be sympathetic to if he had not turned out to be a desperate guy Damien Chazelle , who has a special relationship with music. The director proved this three years ago, bringing Miles Teller to emotional exhaustion and bloody calluses. His new film " La La Land ", which grew up on even more precarious than "Obsession", intimately told about the failed drummer much more - it turns out,
Who else, if not a dreamer, will take his own thesis as the basis of the picture, which is supposed to bring him to the highest Hollywood echelon. As a rule, pen tests at best end up on the very last lines of a resume, at worst - they gather dust in their parents' nightstands. Chazelle did exactly the opposite - " La La Land " not only straightened his shoulders on the foundation of his first painting "Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench", but also overgrown with references to all the movies, songs, places, ideas and images that are dear to the heart of 32-year-old Damien .  Everything turned out to be so simple and complicated at the same time: give Hollywood the sweetest, most tender and vivid fantasy, and the entire world film community will be fascinated by it. However, if you already decided to publicly talk about your own passions, and turn your age and lack of experience into a trump card, be ready for anything. The aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) works as a barista in a cafe on the territory of one of the large film studios, dreams of fame Ingrid Bergman and runs around castings, barely retaining faith in herself and remnants of self-respect after numerous rejections ... The young jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) writes fabulously beautiful music, admires Charlie Parker and plans to open his own club someday. They meet and, contrary to the laws of the genre, remain not delighted with each other. Then they meet again, dance, walk, go to the movies, finally fall in love and dream of a happy, successful future together. Helping each other's dreams come true, young people face a dilemma - to remain true to themselves or loved ones.  It would seem that the plot of the musical is nothing special, and this feeling can flare up and fade out repeatedly while watching. The likes oflove storyare Woody Allen's fiefdoms, to whom, among others, Damien Chazelle pays tribute. However, is the director filming a romantic melodrama with musical inserts? If this were so, we would have become eyewitnesses of the second "Through the Universe", which has the same hooligan energy and a bit of adolescent narcissism, but talking about something completely different. " La La Land " is not a love story at all, it is a story about such an ideal place, to which each of us has been led by dreams at least once.Reality is dictated by emotions: instead of a thousand words, sing and dance. As soon as you start tapping out the rhythm, a girl in a charming yellow dress, by chance, will pick up your melody and perform any choreographic part without any preliminary rehearsals. Here, the first kiss will happen under the stars, and the feelings will overcome even the force of gravity and lift into the heavens. Here music will lead you to where you are destined to be. Girlfriends will support you in difficult times, work will not force you to run without noticing the world around, people stuck in traffic will start the best flash mob in the world, and time will stop, allowing you to enjoy the moment. Here, even the weather forgot that there was something in her arsenal besides the gentle sun, so that Emma Stone could playfully sparkle her slender ankles to the envy of the inhabitants of the northern regions. The ephemerality and innocence of history takes it out of context, makes it truly timeless. Sometimes it seems that the plot really flutters from century to century, and only a video on Youtube , occasionally flashing gadgets and building interiors hint at a link to modernity. But if time is a quantity that Chazelle neglected in his youthful frivolity, then space plays a key role for it. In fact, Damien never leaves Mia and Seba alone: a third person always interferes in the “he + she” relationship - Los Angeles.  This amazingly cinematic city has never had such a loud voice as Chazelle gave it. For him, the City of Angels is not just the famous letters on the hill. These are also places like the Griffith Observatory and the legendary one-screen cinema " Rialto ", where magic was born long before the advent of the Chazelle -director. Taking on the role of a tour guide, he did for Los Angeles what Woody Allen did for New York or Jean-Pierre Jeunet for Paris, and if after “ La La Landa b>"there will be no popular itinerary among travelers around the places of his filming, there will be a nefarious conspiracy of tour operators.  Walking with Mia and Sebastian through the streets of the night metropolis, attentive cinephiles will begin to guess which tapes in the home film library Chazelle are on the honorary shelf. This is not difficult to do: sometimes the author quite artlessly quotes the classics - a window from "Casablanca" in the film studios of the studio Warner Bros. , a lantern in the park, on which Damien drives Ryan Gosling , unable to resist the temptation to blow a kiss to "Singing in the Rain", a fresco at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue depicting Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Charlie Chaplin.
However, not all viewers will be able to easily discern in the failures of Sebastian the motives of "Rebel Without a Cause" or draw analogies of the local love conflict with the collisions of "Cherbourg Umbrellas". There was a risk in this very personal intonation of " La La Landa ", and the whole idea threatened to go to waste. After all, you cannot shamelessly steal from your predecessors, unless you are a genius like Quentin Tarantino, a craftsman like Xavier Dolan, or simply are not in love with cinema like Damien Chazelle . It was this love that allowed the director and his audience to find a common language and connection, which arises among like-minded people. Therefore, the project, which at various stages raised doubts even among its own creator, turned into a holiday, which is now forever with us, despite the fact that it is not based on either a Broadway hit or a literary tome. In addition, he has seven " Golden Globes " out of seven possible, and there will be more.  In general, the whole " La La Land " is built on such contradictions. He, with his bows to films of the 50-60s, is terribly old-fashioned, but from a virtuoso and laborious mass dance number in a traffic jam on the highway, it takes your breath and your pulse quickens. The film is replete with beautiful songs, and yet Stone and Gosling are touchingly out of tune at times and sometimes even laugh right in the middle of the recording. The fact that for Tom Hooper, with his bawling in all directions, even during dialogues "Les Miserables" was considered unacceptable, is quite appropriate here. Moreover, Emma and Ryan , of course, are plastic and graceful, but, for example, they are far from technical Fred Astaire. Yes and no need.  Of course, this does not mean that the actors have not experienced all the delights theatrical backstage in the form of contracted muscles, trembling fingers and overcoming oneself in physical and moral terms. It is Stone that dances tap and jazz with equanimity on his face, it is Gosling 's hands that we see on the keys in long shots. It's just that “ La La Land ” is like that: a hybrid of imperfection and idyll, modernity and old schoolness, energy and melancholy - his most powerful weapon and his charm. At the junction here is even the music of a constant colleague and friend of Chazelle , Justin Hurwitz, who in this case would not be superfluous to call a co-author. His work not only determines the mood, but sometimes moves the story of the picture. And in what other soundtrack jazz, dance rhythm and blues and classics are so boldly and effectively combined, which in an episode in the planetarium will pleasantly remind the USA audience of the scores of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky from "The Nutcracker".And yet La La Land wouldn't be so good without its bittersweet finale. In it, Chazelle breaks the rules of the game, completely coolly adding a measure of pragmatism to this escapist's dream. However, fans of " Obsession " would have been disappointed if this had not happened. The rest, despite the alarming feeling of a trick that came ten minutes before the end, will still look at what is happening, fearing to move or blink, so as not to frighten off the magic of the moment - cinema in its purest form. On the one hand, the last scene, as if created without the participation of such a mundane creature as a person, is an excellent indicator for the viewer. For everyone, the ending will be different and, perhaps, after sharing your impressions with your neighbor in the chair, you will doubt whether you watched the same tape.  On the other hand, in addition to the author's statement about the inexorableness of success, bold in the context of a romantic story, the episode is valuable for other reasons. After all, Chazelle is not the first to encroach on the serenity of musicals - in this he inherits the tradition of Bob Fossey. But, probably, Damien the first or at least rare of his contemporaries who, honestly making it clear that dreams do not necessarily lead to La La Land, made this place absolutely real. The triumph of art, youth, love, life itself ... Such a life-affirming result, perhaps, is stronger than any fashionable horror story about the imminent demise of mankind. The Topic of Article: La La Land: Where Dreams May Come. |
