What if our beloved Canberra was made the setting for a major musical feature movie? This dream is triggered in your dreaming columnist by the way in which Los Angeles is the sweet setting for Hollywood's blockbusting La La Land?
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Ultra-romantic La La Land (screening in Canberra as we speak) follows the dreams of Seb and Mia (played by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone). It is sending the critics into raptures. It has already vacuumed up awards and nominations galore.
Set in Los Angeles it actually uses that city as perhaps the movie's biggest star.
Ever since seeing and loving La La Land I've been imagining a similar style of musical set in our own dear metropolis.
Our Seb and Mia, let us think of them as Noah and Olivia (Oli), might be (although I invite you to choose your own dinky-di lovers) Luke Bracey (dubbed an "international dreamboat") and either Cate Blanchett or (swoon) our supernaturally blonde Margot Robbie.
La La Land (one critic has called it "a love letter to Los Angeles") is doing the city of Los Angeles a power of good. Tourists are going on tours of the iconic LA spots shown in the film, spots where Gosling and Stone sing and dance and fall in love. Then the film is doing sentimental wonders for LA's image, wonders that, such is the fantasy power of film, may last for ever (and a day).
Watching La La Land I was so enthralled that I forgot to nibble my melting choc top. I was thinking of what a Canberra equivalent could do to boost appreciation of our notoriously underappreciated city. Surely for our city's sake the ever-enterprising Barr ACT government must invest extravagantly in such an epic.
LA spots that director Damien Chazelle uses in La La Land include the gorgeous art deco Griffith Observatory. In its planetarium the two lovers float away (the way we all do when we're in love) up into the stars.
Then, downtown, Seb and Mia eat at Sarita's famous café in the must-visit Grand Central Market.
LA is famous for its freeways and traffic jams and La La Land opens with a sensational song and dance sequence arranged on the ramp connecting LA's 105 and 110 freeways.
In my dreamed-of Canberra version we open with a sensational song and dance sequence of joyous passengers aboard a light rail tram as it gambols into town along Northbourne Avenue.
In La La Land the lovers first flirt and sing and dance together at an LA lookout eerily like our Mount Ainslie. And so I see Noah and Oli up on Ainslie, canoodling and tap dancing.
For intense "I love you" moments I see Noah and Oli waltzing in one another's arms in the otherwise deserted green marble splendour of Parliament House's Marble Foyer and also (because my film errs on the side of schmalz) foxtrotting among the tulips alone in a moonlit Floriade.
Then my film has Noah and Oli staring lovingly into one another's eyes seated at a table at the iconic Brodburgers at Kingston.
For the movie's crucial first kiss I see them, again by moonlight, (defying the authorities, for Noah and Oli are Aussie free spirits) rolling down the forbidden grassy slopes of Parliament House. They arrive dishevelled and laughing and then, with the Southern Cross sparkling above them in Canberra's fabulously clear night sky, the music swells and their lips meet.
Everywhere in the world cinema audiences look on enthralled, their forgotten choc tops melting, at the spellbinding Aussie city in which all this lovely magic is dished up.
