The first trailer Damien Chazelle’s La La Land featured a romantically melancholy song sung by star Ryan Gosling, while he and Emma Stone courted and twirled one another around a series of beautifully saturated, old-Hollywood-reminiscent sets. A new trailer reveals new footage of them pretty much doing exactly the same things, except this time with Emma Stone singing a previously unheard song.
This is the 31-year-old filmmaker’s third directorial project, following Whiplash and Guy and Madeleine On a Park Bench, notably also a nostalgically tinged musical, albeit one with a fraction of the budget of La La Land. Both Guy and Madeleine and Whiplash had very different jazzy through-lines, with the former having been a romantic musical featuring a jazz trumpeter and the latter having been an anti-romantic drama about a jazz percussionist — and it seems that through his films, Chazelle’s putting together a whole jazz band. La La Land, another musical, sees Ryan Gosling playing a jazz pianist, while Emma Stone is an aspiring actor who’s currently a barista.
According to Indiewire, this is a love story where the characters’ “respective ambitions threaten to tear them apart.” In the trailer — teasing the film that’ll be out on December 2 in limited release and December 16 across the country — Stone sings a song that could be both about professional and romantic ambition. “Here’s to the ones who dream/foolish as they may seem,” she sings, in the trailer that wholly embraces the corniness of old Hollywood.
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