Is La La Land an homage to The Umbrellas of… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Is La La Land an homage to The Umbrel­las of Cherbourg?

29 Jul 2016

A woman with blonde hair wearing a blue dress stands in a colourful, vibrant setting with pink and blue hues.
A woman with blonde hair wearing a blue dress stands in a colourful, vibrant setting with pink and blue hues.
Direc­tor Damien Chazelle has admit­ted this 60s clas­sic is a key influ­ence on his forth­com­ing musical.

From its use of bright pri­ma­ry colours, to its whim­si­cal tone and briefly glimpsed dance set-pieces, the first trail­er for La La Land sug­gests that direc­tor Damien Chazelle has been gorg­ing on MGM musi­cals. Yet the film it most evokes is not from clas­sic era Hol­ly­wood – in fact, it’s not even Amer­i­can. Rather, the trail­er seems to chan­nel Jacques Demy’s social real­ist operetta from 1964, The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg.

One of the key fig­ures of the Left Bank” group of film­mak­ers who worked and exist­ed con­cur­rent­ly with the young Turks” of the French New Wave, Demy’s film is a flam­boy­ant, colour­ful musi­cal set in the coastal town of Cher­bourg, and stars Cather­ine Deneuve and Nino Castel­n­uo­vo as star-crossed lovers Genevieve and Guy whose affair abrupt­ly comes to a close when he is draft­ed to fight in the Alger­ian war. What it’s known for is the fact that the all the dia­logue – no mat­ter how mun­dane – is sung rather than spo­ken, all set to Michel Legrand’s mag­nif­i­cent and icon­ic score.

Itself influ­enced by Hollywood’s gold­en age of tech­ni­colour musi­cals, it’s easy to see how the sim­i­lar­i­ties with this film and the trail­er for La La Land might stem for a shared com­mon source. But Chazelle has explic­it­ly sin­gled out The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg as an influ­ence, and, based on the trail­er, there is one key aspect that sets it and Demy’s film apart from clas­sic Hol­ly­wood song and dance films – its tone, set by the pen­sive song per­formed by Gosling that plays over it.

The anx­ious, long­ing lyrics could eas­i­ly be describ­ing the feel­ings of Guy, the low­ly mechan­ic whose dreams of mar­ry­ing his lover are thwart­ed when he’s sent off to war: Who knows? Is this the start of some­thing won­der­ful / or just anoth­er dream I can­not make true?’ The melody is sim­i­lar­ly down­beat with an air of melan­choly hang­ing over it, bear­ing a pass­ing resem­blance to I Will Wait For You’, the impas­sioned cen­tral theme from The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg. It’s cer­tain­ly not a song to which you can per­form a mer­ry tap dance, infer­ring that La La Land will not be just a well-chore­o­graphed piece of light heart­ed escapism.

I Will Wait For You’ marks a moment of sear­ing dev­as­ta­tion in Demy’s film. As Guy boards the train, off to ful­fil his mil­i­tary duty, the cam­era tracks back at the same pace as the train, adopt­ing his point of view as the fig­ure of his beloved Genevieve becomes small­er and small­er, before final­ly almost dis­ap­pear­ing into the back­ground. It’s an inspired take on the rail­way sta­tion farewell set-up. It demon­strates all the chutz­pah of a clas­sic Hol­ly­wood musi­cal and all the weepy romance of a clas­sic Hol­ly­wood melodrama.

The way in which Demy evolves MGM’s extra­or­di­nary style is infused with some of the more pes­simistic real­i­ties of ordi­nary, work­ing class life. This is what makes The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg such a pro­found cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence. Though we expe­ri­ence the film through styl­ish shots like this, and the vision of a roman­ti­cal­ly height­ened world where every­body sings and even the dingi­est streets emit a glow of rich, shim­mer­ing colour, the actu­al con­tent of the plot is ground­ed in the prag­mat­ic com­pro­mis­es of real life.

While Guy is away, Cather­ine los­es heart due to his lack of cor­re­spon­dence and, preg­nant with his child, reluc­tant­ly decides to mar­ry anoth­er suit­or. There is no melo­dra­mat­ic roman­tic reunion and Hol­ly­wood hap­pi­ly-ever-after end­ing between the trag­ic lovers – he, too, lat­er set­tles down with a mid­dle-class woman and starts a fam­i­ly of his own. The for­mer lovers’ bliss­ful romance is thus dimin­ished to just a nos­tal­gic shared memory.

Giv­en all this, as well as how his pre­vi­ous film Whiplash defied obvi­ous gener­ic clas­si­fi­ca­tion and a clear over­rid­ing moral mes­sage, here’s hope that Chazelle’s La La Land shows sim­i­lar emo­tion­al com­plex­i­ty rather than being a more tech­ni­cal­ly cold musi­cal pastiche.

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