La La Land: A Critical Appreciation.

There are many kinds of movies, obviously, but many can be broadly categorized into movies you want to watch at home snuggled up in a blanket and movies you would want to see on the big screen with another 100 people, even if that means that you have to road trip to a nearby town. Contrary to what most romantic films are, La La Land falls in the second category. I have developed a history with this movie in the past 2 years that it has been since it released but it is admittedly something I’m extremely partial towards. I have always been interested in films but watching La La Land rekindled my interests, something that was slowly fading away at the time. While I always liked being critical of things and discussing with people, until I saw La La Land, I was only familiar with mainstream content, something so bland that usually, there just wasn’t really that much to talk about. I obviously liked the movie but I realized that maybe I like it too much and before being sure about it, I should educate myself further. 2 years later, I have watched it 8 times (full disclosure, all those 8 times were during the first 9 months of 2017) and I have youtubed the hell out of filmmaking techniques.

The story is extremely predictable. Girl meets guy, they meet a couple more times *by accident*, they dance in front of the beautiful LA skyline at dawn on one of the most nostalgic, classic, guy-and-girl-pretending-they-don’t-like-each-other type songs and then they start dating. But what people don’t understand is that to make a movie feel fresh, the story doesn’t always need to be but the take on that story does. Damien Chazelle, the director, isn’t trying to show us something new, in fact, he is showing us whiplash all over again with a few details changed. While Whiplash talks about the individualistic struggle that one goes through when they strive for greatness, the character conveniently breaking off his relationship in the first half of the film, La La Land explores what would happen if you try to juggle these two amazing things, how you have to let go of things and how at the end of the day, a sad ending is alright sometimes because life isn’t perfect. It is alright because you chose that and goddamn it is worth it.

What La La Land is best at is calling out the romantic in you and when that side of you is fully invested in the movie, it bashes that romantic with a sledgehammer and teaches you the beautiful compromise that life is. It does this by these beautiful, often painful and gut-wrenching close-up moments that sync your emotions with those of the character on screen. These moments linger on for just enough time so that your subconscious can register the micro expressions well enough for you to understand and feel what the character feels, but it doesn’t seem detached. While the most obvious of these moments is the bittersweet smile that Seb and Mia share after the whirlwind of emotions that the epilogue scene has left, the disappointment, awkwardness and the ‘what am I supposed to do?’ expression in Mia’s face during her audition scene when the casting director orders their lunch is something unique that comes to mind. The scene when the two characters go to watch ‘rebel without a cause’ and hold hands and *almost* kiss is something that sounds so trivial as I write it but the sequence itself, with the slow creeping of the hands towards each other and the glances, was the first hook that makes you desperate that all of this works out.

The awkward expression surprise and dare I say ‘disgust’ on Emma stone’s face as Seb’s concert basically pops out into a freak show of primary colours capture her disappointment in him and his passion. The moment takes us back to that Seb’s passionate speech about jazz at the lighthouse café- “It’s conflict and it is compromise, and it’s just… it’s new every time. It’s brand new every night. It’s very, very exciting!”. It takes us back to how Seb pushed Mia to write her own play and then when we come back to reality, it is a sucker punch in the gut because all of that passion has basically slowly wilted and died, all because Seb wanted to be enough for Mia. What we get is a cycle where they have to choose between their love or their passion but finally, with the argument scene, we realize that they just can’t compromise on their passion, most people can’t. Seb tried to prioritize his love and what happened? He became somebody that Mia didn’t even like.

The cinematography glues the film together. As I’ve said before, La La Land isn’t really about the story and it isn’t something you can explain but it’s about the details that trick your brain believing certain things. The cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, worked with Damien Chazelle to understand the story in a way that he could make his cinematography fine-tuned- even if we didn’t understand what was happening, we felt emotional by the end because our mind picked up on the little details. The flashy colours separated us from the movie and the characters. The colours made everything feel fake and separated and like a scam (an analogy of Hollywood, something the movie tributes and criticizes) but the transition of these colours merging into more pastel but simpler, genuine colours as we go through resembles how the movie’s overall tone transitions. That is what art is- while movies like this one deserve an actively watching audience, art is supposed to ‘catch’ you even if you’re only passively watching a movie, something La La Land does almost effortlessly.

When I watched this movie for the first time in the theatre, I didn’t feel like this movie was anything special until it all shattered. I was watching this beautiful movie and while I was enjoying the amazing, visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing songs and dances and I liked every little thing, I have got to admit that I wasn’t particularly attached to the characters, and unusually so. I get attached and invested easily even in some not-so-good Netflix movies but La La Land failed to do that mostly, maybe because we don’t know as much about the characters as much as we’d like to. But really, I was attached to the characters, something I first noticed when I realized that they didn’t end up together and I pieced together that I felt so sad because I was actually pretty attached to the characters without actively noticing it.

Speaking of everything shattering, I want to dedicate a section of this review to the 7-minute epilogue scene. The audience stumbles across to this scene as a group of soldiers wounded at war, only this time the writers, including our favourite Damien Chazelle, take the role of the allies and we are the Nazis. Picture me this- you’re sitting on a recliner in the winters in a theatre and you’ve been watching a movie about two simple yet complex people falling in love and getting involved in each other’s passion and in a matter of 3 minutes, the happy couple who just made up from a fight has been attacked by a ‘5 years later’ which has essentially been out of nowhere and it has ripped away all of your fantasies. While the first scene after that blow was kind of fulfilling, Mia essentially becoming the famous actress going to buy coffee as was shown in the first half of the film, the rest feels like a balloon deflating slowly but painfully. Now you’re at a stage where you don’t know what to feel. You’re trying to be okay- your brain is like ‘well at least they both got to become successful in following their passions’ and ‘that guy is so ugly compared to Gosling. Mia, sis, you could do better.’ and ‘oh their daughter is cute’ and ‘couldn’t Seb just go to Paris with Mia? That makes no sense.’ and ‘this is all so stupid’ and ‘I want to cry’ and ‘NOOOOOOO’. Finally, the two characters stumble on to each other for the very last time- a final showdown if you will.

What you get in this epilogue is so inexplicably beautiful than you can’t even review it other than say that it was gorgeous. The cinematography was more pronounced but it didn’t feel over-saturated. Yes, it was basically a series of homages and the cinematography was used as a tool to depict that but to me, it was so much more and the cinematography played a much bigger, much more inexplicable role than just making it pretty. The scene was a ‘what if’, something that the audience would think about anyway but the fact that even after the beauty of this scene and the seemingly suspicious lack of loose ends, we realize after the smile the characters share that the scene was flawed and toxic. Sebastian didn’t get to open his own jazz club and he had to uproot his entire life for Mia and that’s not how life works and that’s not ideal or beautiful even if it was made to look like it was. The scene was beautiful surely and it filled a void in the audience’s hearts but really, this scene and Mia and Sebastian’s satisfactory, content smile even though that’s not how things panned out basically sums up what the film was trying to say. Life is a complicated story and you don’t get to ride happily into the sunset, at least not in the traditional sense. Life forces you to prioritize and ‘living happily ever after’ doesn’t mean you get everything but it does mean that you get what you sought after the most. While some might disagree, that is a happy ending.