La La Land

Damien Chazelle has named The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as the model more often than any other film, and said the ending of his was written to earn the ending of Demy's. What comes across:

• The saturated block colour, with sets and costumes keyed to each other so a scene reads as one palette
• Two people in an ordinary city, filmed in long unbroken takes that let a song run over a whole location
• A recurring theme that returns transposed as the relationship changes, rather than a catalogue of separate numbers
• The ending: they meet years later, both settled with other people, and the film refuses to give them the reunion the genre is built to deliver. Demy plays it at a petrol station in the snow; Chazelle plays it in a jazz club, and lets his characters watch the version of their life that did not happen

Filed HIGH because the last point is not a borrowing of style. It is the argument of Demy's film, taken up whole.

Damien Chazelle made La La Land as a deliberate return to the classic Hollywood musical, and Singin' in the Rain, a film about Hollywood itself, is among the models it quotes: the song-and-dance numbers staged on real streets and lamp posts, and the story of performers trying to make it in the film business.