The main (if not only) correlation holding any weight between the two films given by those who perpetuate their marriage, is the seemingly parallel plots of two people in love who don’t end up together in the end - complete with both female leads visiting their lost-lover in his new business he mentioned wanting to open earlier in the story. (Considering how frequently this claim was delivered with a total absence of any details that weren't readily available and repeated, such as yours is, intuition should tell you that many of the claimers haven't actually seen it - or most other Demy films for that matter.) Yet strangely, you never see it mentioned anywhere when such claims are made when discussing the two films - probably due to dozens upon dozens of articles that told everyone the claim was airtight without properly supporting it, and uncritical readers just regurgitating it ad nauseam on social media platforms like it was gospel, regardless if they had even seen Cherbourg before themselves. This is quite the glaring flaw in a claim proposing Cherbourg’s supposed overwhelming saturation in La La Land.
So then how is Cherbourg significantly different? Well, to get perhaps the most major and blatant example out of the way: Every single line of dialogue in Cherbourg is performed in sing-sung style, without exception, creating a quasi-opera for the proletariat - a style Demy later carried over into his late-career highlight A Room in Town (which also shares very much in common with Cherbourg). And while both films celebrate this age of Hollywood musicals, they also subvert them and add fresh tweaks on the genre as well. Rochefort, like La La Land, is also a celebratory send-up to the golden age of Hollywood song-and/dance musicals, complete with Gene Kelly playing along and getting his own number, performed with his always wonderful signature touch. The characters of Rochefort spend the film chasing “la la land” for happiness, while Mia and Seb drown themselves in “la la land” and have to escape. On the contrary, in La La Land, Mia and Seb both cross paths multiple times in the same town, but unite very quickly and spend the course of the film believing in their “honeymoon love”, but only finding true happiness in life when they part ways. La La Land also plays the reciprocal to Rochefort’s plot: several couples who are meant to be together spend a few days just narrowly missing encountering each other for the first time, and occupy their time ruminating about how they know “that special someone” is waiting for them somewhere, only to have each couple unite in true happiness in the final moments of the film. What’s so frustrating is about this assertion - other than being unable to escape it socially and in media - is that La La Land barely reflects Cherbourg, and it actually borrows much, much more heavily from Rochefort.įor starters, the two main musical motifs in La La Land - found in “Mia and Seb’s Theme”, “Planetarium”, “A Lovely Night”, and the non-diegetic score, all of which form the backbone of the film’s pathos - are straight up interpolations of songs in Rochefort. Thus, mentioning the two films together has now become an endlessly recycled meme of a misconception. Cue upwards of a hundred or so articles covering the film from all corners of the film press, in most of which the writer mentions Cherbourg only briefly and still somehow exaggerating its influence - sometimes going as far to assert that La La Land's main intent was to pay homage to Cherbourg in particular, above any other film. The (now popular) assertion that posits La La Land as being specifically, overwhelmingly influenced by Cherbourg was conjured up by journalists after the film's press run, during which Chazelle did several interviews where he cited Demy as a heavy reference point in his career, and went on to name Cherbourg and Rochefort as his favorite Demy films - the former being his favorite film ever and “the one he’s always chasing” (i.e., he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to make a film like that).
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