As for her one-woman show, Chazelle doesn’t offer more than a phrase or two-except, perhaps, in the abstracted form of a song that Mia delivers at a key moment, one that’s all about her aunt. Scenes of Mia and Seb together are focussed almost exclusively on the action at hand their dates are shown mainly in a montage that features no dialogue at a disastrous dinner out with her temporary boyfriend Greg (Finn Wittrock), Mia sits silent. The experience that she discusses with Seb is of her aunt, an actress, who, she says, introduced her to classic movies (she cites “Casablanca,” “Bringing Up Baby,” and “Notorious”) she mentions having dropped out of college to pursue her dream in Los Angeles. And that’s just about all. He turns Mia into an absolute cipher, giving her nothing whatsoever to talk about. The one thing that Chazelle seems to have little interest in is life. Chazelle strives to impress, to wow, to dazzle-but not to inspire his musical ideas and visual sensibility are jolting neither in their surfaces nor in their substance, neither in their action nor in their images they close off the imagination rather than opening it. If Chazelle’s intention was to celebrate, among other things, the public face of the city, he failed miserably at it-certainly compared with such masterworks, classic and modern, like Jacques Demy’s “ Model Shop” and Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere.” His big production numbers-a gruff-to-gentle pas de deux for Mia and Seb beneath the streetlights and a splashily colorful jazz ballet in front of a conspicuously painted and lighted and silhouette-shaded theatrical backdrop-are studious, effortful, rehearsed to death, personality-free, and lacking in the essential factor: wonder. I saw “La La Land” in a theatre, sitting up close to a big bright screen, and couldn't tell whether it was filmed on location or in a studio in front of a green screen. The shot remains, for the most part, nearly at eye level, and it doesn’t convey the delights or inspirations of the dancers in relation to their setting so much as the conspicuous labor of rehearsal and execution that kept everyone in order and in place throughout the number and used the camera to cram it all in. But, even before they’ve met, Chazelle has slathered the movie with his coercive version of charm: a massive dance sequence for the drivers stuck on the freeway, emerging from their vehicles, young and old alike (but almost all young), to leap and twirl between and atop cars in one gliding and swivelling long take. Mia’s rehearsing at the steering wheel of her Prius, blocking Seb’s way in his classic-Detroit sixties or seventies convertible he honks, she gives him the finger, and the rest is inevitable. Their paths cross, and cross, and cross again by chance-first, at the tail end of the opening scene, which takes place in a traffic jam on the freeway. Sebastian, or Seb (Ryan Gosling), wants to open a jazz club and wants to play jazz (“pure jazz,” he says), but his pianistic ideal, and the setting in which he shines, is solo. lot, fails at auditions but tries to make a name for herself by writing, self-financing, and performing a one-woman show-and her biggest audition involves her solo performance of a monologue of her own making, for a starring role in a movie that has no script and will, a casting agent says, be “built around” her. Mia (Emma Stone), an actress who’s working as a barista at a café on the Warner Bros. So it is with Chazelle’s musical “La La Land,” in which his two protagonists, who live in Los Angeles, don’t play well with others, either. When he gets into the band, he endures a bloody car wreck to make a gig on time and, onstage, makes his bones not by the sensitivity or imagination of his accompaniment but by commandeering the stage, shutting up and shutting out the entire band with a bombastic solo of such red-hot exertion that it’s unclear whether he’ll be showered with applause or baking soda. He practices obsessively in his room until his fingers bleed he doesn’t jam with his classmates or sit in with other musicians in clubs or bars but focusses single-mindedly on impressing his tyrannical professor in order to be included in the school’s ostensibly career-making concert band. The drummer in his 2014 film “Whiplash” doesn’t play well with others. The director Damien Chazelle’s notion of artistic power isn’t merely inseparable from his notion of will power it’s the very embodiment of it-louder, faster, and alone are his standards of musical quality.
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