Italian viewers are divided into two categories: those who do not like musicals, because they cannot come to terms with the fact that while he is talking, people can suddenly start singing (and we are a country of melodrama!); those who love it agreementaware of the needescapism and unreality. On the wave of that sentimental fantasy that brought fortune to such masterpieces as “Singing in the rain“My fair lady”, “Variety”, “A star is born”, Damien Chazelle in 2016 decides to revive the genre with the help of “La La Land»sacred land of fantasies, dreams of Los Angeles, which he will then smash into “Babylon”.
The film had great success everywhere, earned 6 Oscars out of 14 nominations (only “Eve vs Eve” AND “Titanic“there were such numbers), 7 Golden Globes and the Volpi Cup alla brava Emma Stone at the Venice Film Festival, where these days Chazelle is the chairman of the jury. His film, full of choreography and emotion, is one of love story in which Mia is an aspiring actress working in a Warner Bros cafeteria thinking about Casablanca, and Sebastian is a jazz fan who would like to form a band and open a club.
Between illusions AND disappointment, comings and goings, promises and missed appointments, these two absorb their youth between musical numbers that remain in history, the one among the cars stuck on the road, or the one that Stone performs with his comrades. Among the references to glorious past Hollywood (the movie they’ll see wasted youth) and the impossibility that these miracles today are repeated, the film is an elegy on failures foreseen or unexpected in life, until the grand finale melancholy boy “Splendor in the Grass“. Everything that is anachronistic is calculated, but still seductive For romantic charge that he carries with him, and for the amazing workmanship of Stone and Ryan Gosling, to all of Ken today.
La La Land, Damiel Chazelle, 2016, Sky 302, Tuesday, September 5, 9:15 pm.