La La Land Went Back to Venice With a Live Orchestra, and Cartier Paid for the Room

Ten years after its world premiere at the 2016 festival, La La Land came back to Venice on September 5 for a live-to-film concert staged inside Teatro La Fenice, one of the city's great opera houses.

The Orchestra Regionale Filarmonia Veneta played the score against the picture. Justin Hurwitz, who composed it, conducted. Damien Chazelle, who wrote and directed the film, was in the house.

The reunion

Hurwitz and Chazelle have worked together since long before this film, but nothing they have made has travelled like it. Hurwitz won for both original score and original song, the latter for City of Stars.

"To conduct an orchestra along with La La Land in Venice, where the world first saw the film 10 years ago, is an absolute dream come true," he said.

The orchestra was joined by Randy Kerber, the pianist who played on the original soundtrack recording, and whose jazz figures are among the most recognisable things in the film. Kerber has worked on more than 800 films, Titanic and Forrest Gump among them.

The film had premiered in competition in Venice on August 31, 2016, which makes the venue choice more than sentimental.

The finest musical of the contemporary era

Why the festival wanted it back

Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the festival's cinema department, is unambiguous about where he places the film. He calls it the finest musical of the contemporary era, and the only modern example capable of standing beside the classics of the Hollywood studio period.

"La La Land is a captivating and spectacular film, an unforgettable love story, a heartfelt love letter to Hollywood cinema, a celebration of creativity and a remarkably mature reflection on the nature of success and failure," Barbera said. "Above all, however, it features some of the most beautiful songs and musical compositions of recent years."

The setting did some work of its own. La Fenice's gilded Rococo interior and heavy gold decoration framed a film about ambition and failure in Los Angeles with a certain amount of irony, and a great deal of glitter.

The screening was free to the public, which was the point. The festival has been trying to programme events that serve the city as well as the accredited international audience, and a free concert in the opera house is a more direct way of doing that than most.

The part that is a marketing story

The event was presented by the Cartier Cinema Club, in collaboration with Lionsgate and Hurwitz Concerts, and that is the detail worth attending to.

Luxury houses have moved steadily from sponsoring film events to programming them. Arnaud Carrez, Cartier's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, describes the Cinema Club as a platform for ongoing dialogue and discovery, built around screenings, conversations and masterclasses, with the ambition of developing it internationally while giving each edition an identity drawn from the city hosting it.

That is not sponsorship language. It is the language of a programmer.

What the trade is

The arrangement suits both sides, and it is worth being clear about the terms.

A festival gets an expensive event it could not otherwise finance, staged in a venue that would ordinarily cost a great deal, and gets to give it away free to local residents. A jewellery house gets its name attached to genuine cultural production rather than to a gifting suite, and gets it in a room full of people who make films.

What the film gets is a tenth-anniversary event with the actual composer conducting the actual orchestra, rather than an anniversary edition on a streaming service.

The risk in this model is obvious enough and did not materialise here: brand-funded culture tends towards the safe, and a house choosing which films get the orchestra is a house exercising editorial judgment without ever calling it that. On this occasion it chose a musical that premiered in the same city a decade ago and paid for a free ticket.