La La Land

A musical set in Los Angeles. Mia goes to auditions and works in a coffee shop inside a studio. She is cut off halfway through every reading. Sebastian is a pianist. He wants to play jazz but earns his money playing Christmas songs in restaurants, and one night he refuses and is fired. The two cross paths several times and finally meet. From there the film is divided into four seasons. Winter, spring, summer, autumn, and then another winter. The relationship goes well. Then work enters: Sebastian joins a band to make money, is constantly touring, and Mia stages her own play alone. What the narrative is interested in is not love but choice: the film says both of them got what they wanted and that is exactly why they could not stay together. The last section is a display of possibility. A five minute sequence shows how it would have gone otherwise, and then returns to what happened. The opening is built as a single shot on a motorway and takes place in a traffic jam. Colour is used as a system. The dresses, lights and sky are deliberately pulled toward the palette of old musicals. The film won six Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, cinematography and music. At the ceremony Best Picture was announced for it by mistake and corrected. Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend and J. K. Simmons are in the cast. The music is by Justin Hurwitz. Damien Chazelle wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes classical musicals and can take a sad ending. Who it is not for: anyone who will find its treatment of jazz a problem; the narrative frames the form as a white character's rescue project, and that was criticised.