Movie Review - La La Land (2016)

The story starts like every other old-fashioned musical or romance: there is her, him and there are their dreams. They meet for the first time in car traffic chasing each other with horns because this is a big American metropoly. One of these places where everyone is in a hurry to follow the American dream. For her, it would be become an actress, for him, opening the club in which he will convince guests that jazz still should be considered the best music genre. It sounds quite innocent, but as it happens in life, it is not. Fortunately, whenever problems appear, we can try to solve them universally - with music.

The director Damien Chazelle takes us on a sentimental musical journey using the stories from half a century before and moving them into modern times. Singing, dances, melodies, everything seems to be a bit from a different era. There is a lot of allegories to Hollywood from the past. Fairy-tale atmosphere, but one for which we watch movies, offering an escape for both: us and the characters, played by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Some of the scenes are almost taken from the coursebook "how to make the musical". Like the one in which Mia, hearing the melody played on the piano, pauses, thinks for a moment, and decides to enter the room following sounds. There she finds something that she must have been looking for. Love.

Fortunately for the viewer, it is not the immediate unconditional emotion. The feeling between the characters is perverse and cautious, so typical of contemporary cinema. Instead of passionate kisses, coitus, or planning the wedding one week after meeting, we have innocent hands looking for in a dark cinema. In addition, everything is boosted with a good sense of humor, which makes both characters more realistic and helps the viewers to believe in the story and the feelings which connected those two. If that atmosphere of the fairy tale world would be introduced also in the relationship of the main characters, that could be too much. Luckily it’s not.

The director is also realistic about dreams. They are inked with choices, and we never know which one is right, like in the real life. Something must always be sacrificed, it’s impossible to have everything we want, as Mia and Sebastian, the main characters of the “La la Land” movie, will find out.

When it comes to acting, I think I won’t surprise anyone by saying that such amazing actors as Ryan Gosling and Emily Stone made a wonderful job. This is not the first movie in which they play together and it can be seen that they know their dynamics, in effect making their characters even more interesting for the viewer. If I would really want to complain about something, I could say that Gosling is playing sometimes a bit pale, gives the full stage to Stone. I don’t want to complain though, because the movie is great.

You can see that someone has spent a lot of time, thinking about the music track to the movie. It has some surprising solutions, right, catchy sounds, finally songs are made with such a huge diversity: some are written for one or two actors only, another is pompous, for tens or hundreds singers and dancers. Fortunately, the actors find themselves in both and we do not experience chaos on the screen. There is one thing I could complain about. They refer to dozens of other musicals from the past, thanks to which an attentive viewer with knowledge about cinematography can watch this musical many times, each time discovering new references.

"La la land" is a unique film. Original, but influenced by the biggest musicals from the past, romantic and sentimental, but not to the levels which overwhelm the narration, talking about the dreams and giving hope, but also mentioning about the consequences of the decisions we make, modern, but more traditional than any other mainstream musical from the XXIst century. All that things are making it worth to be watched.

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Thank you for reading,
@papi.mati