La La Land: What is the magic of the film?

And why is a musical look like a "fighting club"

Damen Shazella, who won prizes at festivals in Venice and Toronto, who set a record on the Golden Globe and, seemed to become a favorite film of millions of spectators in absentia, was released in Russian rental (finally) on January 12, on January 12. In 2017, a new triumph is probably waiting for the picture, since the movie academy always votes for the ribbons taken about it - to recall at least the Berdman and the Artist. At the request of Medusa, the film critic Yegor Moskvitin understands what the magic of La La Lada is.

We praised La La Land twice-first in a report from the film festival in Toronto, then in an article on the results of 2016. Therefore, each new retelling of the plot is increasingly reminiscent of a bike about friends, whom you love very much and for whom you are longer. The novice actress Mia (Emma Stone) works a baro in a cafe at the Hollywood studio: to get to the auditions, after which she has never called back. The musician Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) plays the piano in the restaurant and dreams of opening his jazz club, but there are not enough savings even to pay for the apartment. As befits the heroes of the musical, Mia and Seb now and then intersect in the multimillion-dollar Los Angeles-either in a traffic jam, then at a relaxed California party, then in a restaurant where jazzmen is prohibited from playing jazz. And of course, fall in love with each other - and begin to dream and be afraid together.

It is scary to imagine what would happen to this film if the main roles in it were played (as planned) Miles Teleler and Emma Watson, actors gifted and loved by the viewer, but not having a stories that would give La-la-Lend a special force. The fact that for Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling is, sorry for the stamp, the work of all life, at least by the way they received their “golden globes”.

Stone and on the stage of the Golden Globe remained inside her role - she shared a reward with other novice actors who have been waiting for them to call back. Once she herself escaped from Arizona for the same dream. Gosling spoke about his wife - actress Eve Mendes, who was retracted from Hollywood to raise children, save her brother from cancer - and allow her husband to work calmly. Those who have already watched the film will be able to evaluate how much her feat is tangled by the key thought of the plot.

The young director Damien Shazell, who will turn 32 a week later, went to La La Land the longest: the idea of ​​the musical was born in his student years, but even after the success of “Obsession” (2014), the film did not turn out right away. All these years he was supported by a friend and permanent composer Justin Gurvitz, with whom they played in one group in his youth, and then became neighbors in the hostel. True, not in any ghetto, but in a prestigious Harvard-but La La Land also about the fact that there are no ideal biographies.

In the modern world, where the actors are so close to the audience (each of them can be tapped on Facebook, they will suddenly answer), their stories cannot be left behind the scenes - they involuntarily fit into the context of the film. They do not distract from the picture itself, but bring it to perfection, turning the most fabulous from the cinema - musical - into a realistic parable.

“La La Land” is both the revival of the gold standard of Hollywood musicals (as well as French, because here you feel the sentimentalism of the paintings of Jacques Demi), and their decisive reform. Thanks to the film, the most simple -minded cinema is suddenly starting to talk about the most difficult things. For example, that with a classic Hollywood choice - between a vocation and a family - there is no longer a correct answer. And that the achievement of the desired does not guarantee happiness at all, but the refusal of the struggle is even more so.

Musical numbers were removed - or rather, neige - masterfully, but the film fascinates not by performance (we met with skill in the cinema before), but with its intention. Against the backdrop of “La La Lada”, Shazella “Obsession” begins to seem like a technical study, and “Chicago”, “Moulin Rouge” and last year’s “annealing” of the Lurman base-lifeless stylizations. In “La La Land”-perhaps thanks to his self-irony or autobiography-there is something that makes any cliches convincing.

There is a meeting scene in the cinema, but it looks as if before that there were no such dates before - neither in “true love” nor in the “taxi driver”. Here, the heroine has a photo of Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca on the wall, and the hero asks for money for a cost -pill with his sister - and this detail makes them respectfully treat their dreams.

Here, along with the heroes, the whole city lives and breathes, and even a minute appearance of an elderly African American couple in the frame is enough for the viewer to compose a whole plot for them. In the cafe where the Mia works, young scriptwriters plan something, and if some Woody Allen would destroy them in a similar scene, then the young director Shazell is clearly in love with them.

And here is a huge cordbale, blocked by one of the transport arteries of Los Angeles and began to dance. But this is not just a spectacular number at the beginning of the film, shot on the same one plan. This is a software statement by the authors: life is a stuffy traffic jam in which you can go crazy, but we will now show you that there is beauty in it.

With all the individualism of any creative ambitions “La La Land”-a story for those who want to feel part of something big and beautiful; And a story that will support everyone, in whom there is an audacity of hope. The musicals, like military marches, greatly contribute to the development of the elite of the elbow: it is no coincidence that the genre was so popular in the USSR (and in Russia sharply disappeared) and not a single Bollywood thriller can do without songs. The love of “La La Land” seems to be very quickly a kind of marker-after all, this is a generational film through which the audience will explain themselves and their life choice.

At the same time, his charm is such that it is completely incomprehensible with which of the exemplary films “about life” to compare it: “Memory Diaries”, “Proximity”, and “500 days of summer”, and “when Harry met Sally,” and “Wicker Park” (Wicker Park, 2004) against the background of “La La Laza” suddenly become something small. Today it seems that for dreamers a picture of Shazella, like Wall Street for financiers, will work forever.

However, one film, on which La La Land is somewhat amazingly similar, still exists. This is a "fighting club." The writer of the Palanik, perhaps, started him as a manual instructions, but director David Fincher turned him into a virtuoso conformism guide. The film taught not to abandon life in the consumption society, but to replay it: earn and spend, as the hero of Edward Norton, but at the same time lead such an inner life so that cubes appear on the stomach, like Brad Pitt.

“La La Land”, mixing life with fiction (so-that becomes painful) and forcing to choose each hero between fidelity to himself and devotion to another, requires the same from the viewer. And either he discourages from any movements to the dream, or, on the contrary, pushes towards her. To find out your relationship with this film, you need to start with the main question: consider his finale happy or not?

Egor Moskvitin