La La Land

“How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist?” John Legend’s Keith asks Sebastian (Gosling) in La La Land. It’s a valid question that Seb never really has an answer for and, perhaps more pertinently, neither does director Damien Chazelle. Fortunately for this immaculately dressed contemporary musical, the seduction of the past is just as potent for audiences as it is for the characters. La La Land is finely cut, A-grade nostalgia that proves nigh-on-impossible to resist.

Feet will be tapping right from the off thanks to a polychrome opening number, in which the grumbling denizens of a Los Angeles traffic jam burst out of their cars to sing and dance before silently slinking back behind the wheel and into everyday drudgery. It’s a clear riff on Fellini’s 8 1/2, and more appositely the work of Jacques Demy, whose spectre lingers throughout La La Land’s shifts between fantastical musical whimsy and the realities of life. Although Seb and Mia (a winning Emma Stone) are presented as struggling artistes, their plight is always relatively comfortable – Chazelle acknowledges this at the outset with a jokey title that reads ‘winter’ over a gloriously sunny day.

As with much of La La Land, Chazelle is having his cake and eating it. He playfully chides genre conventions while making an ode to past masters. He lays open his characters’ own faulty nostalgia but can’t see it through and ends with a scene taken straight from Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Of course, none of that matters if the cake is this delicious. Gosling and Stone may be no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but their chemistry is undeniable and they’re capable of carrying the soundtrack’s catchy – if hardly extraordinary – tunes. In much the same way that flights of fancy give the characters respite from the compromises of life, La La Land has enough about it to distract from its flaws. It may not have answers, but it more than makes up for it with enchantment.