We’ve been here before, in any case, the heat of the city stirring unruly passions à la West Side Story, though real conflict drove the movement there, and the energies here seem vapid in contrast.
We are perhaps primed, then, to read a wilful, even predictably dutiful, trip to the 1950s via the Disney Channel in the hot mess we are given for starters. The film’s poster has been hijacked several times in recent weeks to lambast Brexit negotiations, another form of spirit-breaking gridlock in which nostalgic fantasy and cultural reductionism have been crushed uncomfortably together. What breath of fresh air might release these pent-up, pining spirits, I hear you ask? Why, dance, of course! And song! The opening number, with its cornball Gap-ad/ Glee-style rainbow harmony and apparent absence of satire, had me eyeballing the exit, seeming at best well-intentioned naivety put through its paces, and at worst a clumsy backfire in the handling of an art form’s racial politics (a bit like the jazz theme, in fact). We begin on a jammed LA overpass in the baking heat, with anything that could possibly stifle a body and soul set to high.
This, we learn from Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), is what governs jazz, as well as, presumably, love, life, the universe, the TV remote, and everything.