'La Ola' Review: Sebastián Lelio’s Audacious Fourth Wall-Breaking Musical Mostly Hits All the Right Notes

“We were looking for our own solution – conceived, thought out, made from Latin America – to the problem of making a contemporary musical film, in a genre that has tended to be confined to nostalgia exercises,” he defines via Zoom from his hotel room. “What we try to do was a film about today, which mixes show and politics, and uses the musical mechanisms for what the musical exists, which is to talk about what the words are not enough for.” Ins…

'La Ola' Review: Sebastián Lelio’s Audacious Fourth Wall-Breaking Musical Mostly Hits All the Right Notes

CANNES – A musical inspired by the 2018 feminist protests in Chile that included many students, Sebastián Lelio’s fascinating and frequently vibrant new film “La Ola” is unlike most anything he has done before. If you were to look through his recent filmography, which includes everything from the confined thriller of sorts “The Wonder” to the acclaimed drama “A Fantastic Woman,” you wouldn’t see him as one to take on a project like this. Continu…