Damien Chazelle's most recent cinematic creation, La La Land, had a very good opening weekend. The film that alludes to a previous time in Hollywood film already picked up a few Critic's Choice Awards on Sunday and on Monday received seven Golden Globe Nominations, making it a frontrunner for the Oscars in a few months. But what makes this film about love and ambition so compelling and original?
For anyone that's ever lived in Los Angeles, it tells a faithfully real tale of a dreamer in this city. Enter Emma Stone as Mia, an aspiring actress who flounders through the film industry, managing to survive with a barista job on the Warner Brothers lot. Though she and her roommates get a taste of Hollywood glam through the parties they attend and the auditions they are forced to endure, for the most part, Mia is ignored and unappreciated by Hollywood.
As the movie follows Mia's attempts as an actress, it highlights a few quintessentially L.A. things that help the plot progress. The opening scene alone, which takes place in traffic on the express ramp from the 105 to the 110, is painfully relatable to anyone who's tried getting from LAX to Downtown during rush hour, and provides a less-then-cute meet-cute for Mia and Ryan Gosling's Sebastian. At one of the house parties she attends, Mia's friend is stuck talking to a screenwriter who hilariously fulfills the "it's so rewarding to see your work come to life" archetype. And as she leaves a party, Mia is caught in one of millions of zoned "No Parking from 9pm to 6am," which doom parallel parkers throughout the city to their car being towed.
Luckily, this towing fiasco helps Mia re-meet Sebastian at a restaurant where he played. Gosling's role as a struggling jazz pianist captures a rarity of the music scene in Los Angeles, one of "seeing" the music rather than listening to it. At the start, he obsesses over a jazz club that faced a remodel as a "Samba and Tapas place," but he aims to open a club of his own.
The two's dreams are completely different, but Mia and Seb feed and motivate each other's dreams, from inspiring a one woman show to drawing the logo for Seb's club. And though the tale of romance and dreaming is one told thousands of times before, somehow Stone opposite Gosling makes the whole story seemingly refreshing and beautiful. The chemistry the two have displayed in roles past translates beautifully into song and dance.
Whether they're soulfully singing or waltzing through the Griffith Observatory, one thing's for sure: La La Land is a classic in the making that will make you want to sing and dance along with them one moment yet move you to tears the next.
