Over the weekend, I got the chance to see the movie “La La Land” and I walked out of that theatre with a completely different mindset than when I walked in. There are very few movies that have been released recently that have made any impact on my life. Usually, you can predict what will happen in the beginning of the movie when the plot starts unraveling in front of you. This movie completely went against any of the norms for movies that have come out and maybe that’s why I was so intrigued by it. Walking into a theatre knowing that Ryan Gosling is the male lead role, one can expect that a happy ending is almost 100% guaranteed. This movie taught their audience a different lesson in almost every scene and that was absolutely breathtaking.
Many people shy away from seeing musicals because they either bore them or they feel that the music takes away from the actual plot of the movie. From the very start of the movie, we are introduced to Mia and Sebastian as being two ambitious people that want nothing else, but to succeed in their career paths. Nowhere in the movie do any of these characters show that they have any interest in finding love or needing it to be happy. Mia worked in a coffee shop and would run from audition to audition just to get her start in the world of acting. Sebastian was a lover of jazz in a world that did not appreciate the true beauty of it and he would get any job he could playing songs that he found superficial (like Christmas music or just music that everyone loved, but he didn’t).
All throughout the movie, Mia and Sebastian would never stop encouraging each other, especially when their relationship did blossom. Mia never shut down his dream to open his own jazz club and Sebastian never stopped Mia for auditioning for everything that she can possibly attend to. Most movies that come out never show the struggle between a career and love, especially when two ambitious people are involved. Either the movie ends with them being together or their careers end up becoming mediocre versions of what they dreamed because they chose a different lifestyle. But, that’s not the reality of things at all, especially in terms of love and career. When one dreams of becoming the best in their career, nothing or no one will stand in their way. Love can definitely be an interference in actually pursuing what you want to become, but that shouldn’t be the reason why you stop trying. Damien Chazelle, the director, illustrated that throughout the entire movie through the amazing selection of music and action of the entire movie. He didn’t need his characters to find a happily ever after in their love life, but he wanted them to find that happily ever after in a dream that not many people believed in.
The music in this movie could not bore if you truly got into the plot itself. It completely takes you onto this magical trip through the character’s lives and let’s the audience jump into the director’s vision of what he wanted this movie to become. The singing only depicted the true excitement or sadness of what Mia and Sebastian were going through when no one believed in their dream or when they did find love, but their careers were going nowhere near where they dreamed of going. We live in a society that wants answers as quick as possible and we lose the focus of what makes those answers so valuable to begin with. Mia was trying to succeed in a career path that would not be realistic for many people; she wanted to show the world her talent through acting. Sebastian was trying to bring back a genre of music that was not popular at all, in the present day, by showing the true light and power of it. Both of them did not get answers right away, but they kept fighting and completing obstacles that made the end result so much more powerful. So, yes maybe we have to truly listen to the music in this movie and truly understand what these characters were going through without judging why the role of music is so important in every scene.
Spoiler Alert
In the end, their love did not win. Their happiness won. Sebastian opened up his own jazz club and had huge amounts of people attending every night, while Mia became the actress that she always dreamed of becoming. When they did spot each other after so many years, there was no contact between them; they both had understood what really mattered. The last song at the end of the movie really struck with me and that was because the director allowed the audience to see the life of these two characters if they ended up together. But, when reality struck again, they were both in different stages of their lives, but they were happy. The ending opened up a new theme in movies, which was that love doesn’t need to always win to be truly happy. They both contained these dreams within them before they even met and meeting each other would not stop them from becoming their dream selves.
