Film Melee: Chazelle the Gazelle
Damien Chazelle. The whole time that I was writing this piece ‘Chazelle’ kept auto-correcting to ‘a gazelle’. Hmmmm. Not too far off. Damien Chazelle's aesthetic as a director is much like that of a gazelle. He brings a nimble tempo to dilute the weight of all the heavy emotions his characters bring to their story. Whiplash, La La Land, Babylon all of his main characters are in pursuit, engaged in the chase of making-it in the arts. Like the gazelle, their predators like to chase them, they enjoy eating them alive.
That is what this industry, Hollywood, likes to do to people, it fuels itself on all the passionate gazelles running towards the stage. Damien Chazelle not only captures that but does so in a way that brings our attention to the gazelle’s beauty and makes us understand why they engage in the chase, why they try to outrun the Lion all the way into the safety of the spotlight.
Damien Chazelle, 38 years old, is an Academy Award winning director and producer. His films: Whiplash, a story of an ambitious young jazz drummer discovered by an intense and terrifying, yet highly decorated instructor, together tip-toeing the line between pain and passion. Babylon, a 3-hour 1920s epic about the underbelly of Hollywood at the turn of the industry with the introduction of synched sound aka talking pictures–yes that's right, it's basically a gory, explicit, and much longer “Singin’ in the Rain”. And finally, the famous, almost Oscar winning, La La Land [just kidding it did win six Oscars, just not Best Picture], Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s beautiful journey of falling in-and-out, and then back-in love with… their art? eachother? …themselves..?
All the ugly truths of the entertainment industry are told in a way that forces the audience to understand its compulsion. Chazelle is so raw, so honest, which to me is the captivity of it all. He is artistic, uses quick shots and consistent colors, all his films have a consistent aesthetic, but he is not too artistic for the truth. The ugly, brutal, truth of Hollywood and music: the endings are not always what we expect, not reality, but that doesn’t mean the journey was not beautiful and worth it.
What all of these films have in common is the satisfying unsatisfying ending. The final scene is always an intimate moment with our main characters where no dialogue is exchanged. In context of the epics that Chazelle creates it is always so striking to me the way he strips it all away and lets simplicity control the endings. Then I stumbled over an interview where he explained, “It would be an honest movie if every dream came true and it would be an honest movie if every dream didn't” — he is “just trying to end the movie with pure cinema.”
Damn, I think I just fell in love with this man. After the elaborate show Chazelle orchestrates in these films the cherry on top is that we are left with the beauty and power of raw cinema. That’s exactly what he gives us as we see Babylon protagonist Diego relive his glory days in Hollywood, projected before him after being made into a commercial movie. It’s a similar exchange with Stone and Gosling in La La Land — we hang on tight and follow their fairytale through the entire anticipatory period, then watch it fall out from under us just as they climax.
The final scene is a flash into what life would’ve been like if they (/we)got the happy-ending, then we snap back to reality a single look is exchanged and the credits are rolling.
The ugly truth of life and the beauty in that ugliness — that’s what Damien Chazelle tackles (and he does so with the grace of a gazelle). As a creator himself, making unique yet mainstream films, Chazelle’s spotlight on the ugliness of Hollywood is intriguingly hypocritical. Similar to his characters, he himself challenges parameters of Hollywood’s production of long, visually aesthetic, creative, critical, motion pictures all while questioning the system that allowed him to do so. But that’s the beauty of it. That is the unsatisfying satisfaction that I get walking away from his films. Like many of his characters, he is pushing a button, a button that feels like it shouldn’t be pushed, but keep pushing it long enough and you start to see the art and beauty in their pitiful relentlessness.
You understand that they are not the ones to be pitied, we are. That's what happens in Hollywood: once people have ‘made it,’ everyone acts like they were always this idol. But everyone has to be the beggar at some point, Damien Chazelle included. He told CBS News in an interview about how La La Land, a long musical about Hollywood, was his passion project. But he had to prove himself first. Whiplash, which evolved from a 20 minute short he presented at Sundance in 2013 went on to win three Oscars and become Chazelle’s foot-in-the-door to get Hollywood interested in the concept of La La Land.