The music behind “Another Day of Sun” is an excellent example of how Hurwitz has made use of this practice.
The best example may be Legrand’s practice of recording a jazz trio of piano, bass, and drums in front of a symphony orchestra. Justin Hurwitz, who played in a band with Chazelle when they were teenagers and has composed the music for all four of Chazelle’s films, has talked about his borrowings from Legrand’s cinematic compositions. The soundtrack of La La Land has much in common with the scores that French composer Michel Legrand wrote for Demy’s films. In Umbrellas, of course, no one ever stops bursting into song. And like the agile motorists at the beginning of Chazelle’s film, actors seem to spontaneously break into singing and dancing throughout Young Girls. “Another Day of Sun” features several actors singing in English but imitating the conversational style of the songs in Demy’s films. As in Umbrellas, actors sing in a quickly articulated style with a conversational tone, much like the vocals of French performers Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel. Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) also comes up in Chazelle’s interviews. The use of bold colors for costumes, interiors, and even cityscapes in La La Land recalls the look of Demy’s film, as does an emotionally charged conclusion in which the lovers are not reunited. In interviews, Chazelle regularly singles out Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) as his favorite film. Chazelle had this scene in mind when arranging La La Land’s opening song “Another Day of Sun” to be passed from one motorist to another as they step out of their cars to sing in the middle of a gigantic traffic jam.Ī more crucial influence on La La Land is the work of the French director Jacques Demy. Thanks primarily to a singing troupe of soldiers marching across the country, the song is finally passed to Jeanette MacDonald, who gives it her own operatic interpretation from high up in her chateau. Different groups of people hear the song and sing it themselves so that anyone passing by can also pick it up. Chazelle has claimed another minor bit of inspiration, admitting that “Another Day of Sun,” the production number that follows the Cinemascope gag, was based on the scene in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) that begins with Maurice Chevalier singing “Isn’t It Romantic” in a simple tailor’s shop. At the very beginning of La La Land, the outer edges of a square space containing the word “Cinemascope” suddenly expand to the traditional wide-screen ratio, recalling the opening scene of Tashlin’s film in which actor Tom Ewell appears to physically push the walls of the image to the outer edges of the screen. 2Ī catalog of the many films and cinematic traditions that Chazelle has addressed in La La Land should start with his joking reference to Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). He wanted “to smash into that old-fashioned musical logic” by finding magic in the “grit and texture” of everyday life. As he has said in interviews, Chazelle was as devoted to seriously representing the emotional lives of his characters as he was to paying homage to American musical cinema. But Chazelle does more than just quote from classical musicals, and he makes no attempt to recreate their aesthetics. A work of profound cinephilia, La La Land references multiple films, most of them in the musical comedy genre. Nevertheless, I argue that the film navigates some treacherous waters with intelligence and charm and that it ultimately makes a strong case that jazz does indeed still matter.Īny understanding of La La Land as a “jazz film” must begin by situating it within larger traditions.
To make matters worse, Keith (John Legend), the one important black character in the film, creates commodified pop music and even features tacky dance routines in his stage shows.Īlthough I found much of the film exhilarating and moving, I am more than a little uncomfortable with La La Land’s racial politics. 1 Critics objected to the prominence of two white stars in a film about that uniquely African American cultural practice, jazz. The film’s appropriation of jazz in the face of the music’s complicated racial histories has driven a backlash against the film. But like almost every other American film that would represent jazz, La La Land runs smack up against racial issues. If nothing else, the omnipresence of jazz in a film so widely honored suggests that jazz still has some resonance with audiences.
Damien Chazelle, a serious jazz aficionado since childhood, has made the music central to both the plot and the score of his film La La Land (2016).
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