Summary
The film starts with a traffic jam on the freeway. We hear radios playing and horns beeping against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. Gradually the first of our musical soundtracks starts up—"Another day of Sun"—as the camera pans along the row of stationary cars. Then, with a solo by one driver, reality as we have so far seen it is broken and the musical emerges. The driver gets out of her car and begins dancing and singing on the freeway. She’s joined by others who similarly leave their cars and join the choreographed spectacle.
And then we have the first of the section titles: Winter. The traffic is stationary again and we zoom in on an individual—this time, Sebastian—who is playing and then replaying jazz piano in his car. We then move to Mia, who’s pretending to be on the phone, acting out her lines for an audition. Which means she’s not focused on the road and stalls Sebastian behind her. He drives past and honks his horn.
At her waitressing job at the cafe, after having served a successful film actress working nearby, Mia remembers her own audition and rushes out, crashing into a man who spills coffee all over her. The audition is a complete disappointment. She’s interrupted at a very emotional moment in the piece by a PA with a phone message, and at that point they stop the audition. Back at home, her housemates persuade her to go with them to a party where "a little chance encounter could be the one [she’s] waited for." She’s not keen, she doesn’t have the energy to spend time with "social climbers" but, by the end of musical number "Someone in the Crowd," she’s joined them, and is back on her way. After a dispiriting party, where she connects with no-one, she finds her car’s been towed away. Having to journey on foot, she’s attracted by the sound of the piano in a club where Sebastian is playing. As she listens, we hear the sound of a car honking. Now we return to the traffic jam at the start—only this time, it’s from Sebastian’s perspective, and he’s irritated that Mia is holding him up in the queue. We now follow his track.
We find him staring at a samba-tapas venue called the Van Beek, and then at home where his sister has paid a surprise visit, worried that he’s living like a hermit. She’s got a point—all his possessions are in boxes. After a brief stint practicing the jazz piece we heard in his car in the opening sequence, we cut to the lounge area where he works.
It’s clear there’s been a problem before—that Sebastian hasn’t been playing the set list—and his boss is at pains to point out who’s in charge and what Sebastian needs to do to keep his job. Sebastian starts off with the Christmas song list, but veers off track and is fired. As he’s leaving, he bumps into Mia, who wants to tell him how wonderful his playing was, but he just brushes past her.
Analysis
It is announced even before the film properly begins that the movie was filmed in CinemaScope, a format hardly used since its zenith in the 50s and 60s. This is a nod to the heyday of the Hollywood musical and an homage to its influence.
The film opens on a clear blue sky, but we can hear cars beeping their horns, and the sound of radios and music playing. The interruption of noise into this peaceful visual is significant. The film never shies away from placing its characters and its story in a world surrounded by the larger world—stars and weather and seasons and noise. This story is local, despite it taking up the whole of our screens, and we are reminded of that, as we are in this first shot. There’s also the sense that any one moment or experience can have two aspects—a lovely day, and yet a traffic jam. Life is very seldom black and white.
We start the film with an anonymous row of cars stuck in traffic, but when our first driver begins singing and steps out of her car, we see the film’s interest in zooming in on detail, on individual characters. This is going to be about the hubbub of the city, the landscape and the people of LA, but it will also—crucially—be about the individual within it. She sings: "we were seventeen, but he was sweet and it was true, still I did what I had to do. ‘Cuz I just knew." As others join her, the break with reality is conclusive. The film suggests that her solo and her emergence from the car encourages others, as though her creative burst is infectious and so others, and soon the whole freeway, are drawn to it, keen to express themselves too. This is echoed in the song: "And some day as I sing the song,/A small-town kid will come along,/That’ll be the thing to push him on." There is a lot of individual expression of joy and creativity, and also an overwhelming sense of community, of solidarity and support—we see people opening other peoples’ car doors to encourage them to leave and dance. And the choreography, although uniform at times, incorporates individual moments of creative expression and spontaneous duets as well—we see an older woman dancing in red with a fan, a jazz band playing, a man breakdancing. The characters in this opening section are wearing clothes you’d expect for a warm morning on the freeway. There are no "typical" dancing outfits, but rather a mix: casual summer clothes, business suits, baseball caps, T-shirts and trainers. The combination of realism and an explosive expressiveness somehow gives us permission to believe this is accessible even in our day to day. It also announces that the film is a musical.
This opening section is presented in one take, and so we feel we are capturing something happening in real time. This explosion of joy is here and now. Although clearly coordinated, the feel of the one shot gives it a reality and grit, as though it hasn’t been pre-prepared at all. It’s happening now, and we happen to be watching. It’s also as though what’s happening could have been missed if we hadn’t been there to see it; or that as soon as we are there to see it these people spring into joyous action—all it takes is an audience, and L.A. will be ready to perform. They soon go back to their cars and to the beeping and everything continues as normal. Stuck in traffic.
When we first meet Sebastian in the car, we see his face first through the mirror, as though it’s not the real Sebastian we get, but the image through another medium, like in film. He’s playing and re-playing jazz. A couple of cars ahead is Mia. We think we know what she’s doing: having a conversation with someone on the phone. But it turns out to be an audition piece. In these cars, people have their own space and their own dreams, and it might not be what it looks like on the surface.
The next section is about Mia, and in a short space of time we really feel the emotional rollercoaster that is her life. She’s working as a waitress where we see her serving a famous actress. As she stares after her in awe, she’s brought back to reality: she has her own audition. We see the gulf between where she is and where she wants to be; and yet every audition offers the promise of a new life, of being able to switch her place from behind the till to in front of it. And then the reality of the audition: she’s not even able to finish her piece without being interrupted, and so back home she goes to flop on her bed in front of a huge poster of Ingrid Bergman. The contrast between her own life and the one she is reaching for feels stark. The ups and downs continue. Having been persuaded in the upbeat musical number "Someone in the Crowd" to go out with her housemates to an L.A. party to network, she’s left disappointed again after a superficial night which ends with her singing at her reflection in a bathroom mirror. Just like the earlier shot, when she’s out of the shower before she’s been persuaded by her flatmates to go out, she’s looking at herself in the mirror. Auditions and parties come and go but her and her reflection, both times lit in dark and red light, stay the same. She’s unfulfilled and no amount of superficial excitement can save her from that. What she confronts in the mirror is the reality and after the party she sings, "Is someone in the crowd the only thing you really see? Watching while the world keeps spinning 'round. Somewhere there's a place where I find who I'm gonna be. A somewhere that's just waiting to be found." At this point, she’s still waiting to be found. And when she realizes her car has been towed away, we really do feel that it’s a long journey to her desired destination. As it turns out, she’s about to take a significant detour, to a jazz club where Sebastian is the pianist.
Once we’ve been introduced to Mia, the perspective switches to Sebastian, and we see his situation encapsulated. After a stop at the drive through, he’s sitting in front of a poster for Californian oranges. Once again fiction and reality are juxtaposed here: Sebastian, real and feeling, sits in front of a projected image of a luscious, fruitful and fake California. We will soon realize that the distance between his reality and the picture-perfect ideal is, much like it is for Mia, quite significant. Back at home, where he hasn’t unpacked and his life is in boxes, we quickly realize how static his life is. His sister is worried about the amount of time he spends hanging around the Van Beek. She wants to introduce him to someone, but he insists he would have nothing to say to a girl who didn’t like jazz. Of course, later on with Mia, he sees her lack of understanding of the art form as an excuse to teach her about it, rather than push her away. Despite the warnings from his boss to play the designated set list, Sebastian veers off track as though in a dream, signaled by the dimmed lights and then the spotlight on him as he plays. Either the spotlight shows him in the moment where he is able to be himself, or it shows Mia’s perspective: that he is all she can see. Perhaps it's both: certainly, in a sense they share this moment, even while they each withdraw into themselves. Sebastian is truly in himself, expressing what he wants to with no care for who is around him, so much so that the camera doesn’t even see the other people there. As he awakens from his reverie at the end of the piece, natural lighting is restored, and we realize nothing has changed and no one, except Mia, has noticed. He’s gone entirely unappreciated. And refusing to conform has lost him his job. It’s a tough world in L.A. where, until you’re somebody, you’re absolutely nobody, with very little opportunity to be anybody because no one will give you the chance to be you.
