La La Land explores the delicate balance between love and career, acting as much as a slice of reality as pure movie magic. Rarely do we find movies that resurrect the cinematic glory days while infusing contemporary elements so perfectly. La La Land refuses to bastardize or idolize. It simply is.
We are rapt as Mia and Sebastian, two ambitious old souls, navigate their respective arts in a world where career takes precedent over love. Just like jazz is all about compromise and conflict, as fanatic and virtuoso Sebastian admires, so are work and relationships. And these characters are as averse to complacency and mediocrity as we are, which makes the ensuing collapse of their romance that much more tragic. The stakes are dramatic. Their refusal to let each other fall only leads to their rising on diverging paths. Can soulmates survive in the pursuit of personal ambitions? If Mia and Sebastian are any indication, then the dreamers among us are condemned to lonely lives.
But they gain experience, perspective, and personal satisfaction, a painfully bittersweet payoff not often explored in Hollywood film. People pay different prices for success and happiness, and genius doesn't always equate to solitude and heartache. Chazelle's portrayal of struggling artist, of struggling anything, is one marked by hope, reduced to reality, and classically romanticized.
The whirlwind fantasyland of a soundtrack allows even the skeptics to enter Chazelle’s beautiful imagination. It compartmentalizes the emotion and excitement the film requires to survive. With a bluster that breathes life into movie musicals, anachronistic and sentimental, the music tells the story like a second dialogue. The technical production—dancing, playing, singing—sets the scene and transcends the barriers arranged by a modern artistic era.
In an ever-expanding industry that encourages new media mediums, people argue film is dying. We recently ushered in the golden era of television. The age of technology reveals our continual obsequious worship of Internet sensations. Netflix offers escapism from the comfort of home. Yet, Chazelle reminds, this merely means we must work harder to preserve an equally important art in an age of emerging arts. Expansion of culture into different fields isn’t detrimental; in fact, rather wonderful. But that does not excuse moviemakers from producing challenging and pure content—it demands spectacular creations to thrive in the competitive arena. If anything, the forthcoming competitive platforms should encourage a cinematic renaissance. Movies like La La Land are crucial to this renewed appreciation of the silver screen--it refuses to succumb to sycophantic themes to garner mass media approval and financial backing. In true starving artist fashion, it was built out of the pockets of daydreaming collaborators, Chazelle and Hurwitz, burning to tell a story close to their hearts. It is intimate, written and produced for them first, and then anyone willing to listen.
I have been an obsessive cinephile since 11-years-old. The obsession only grew when my grandfather introduced me to the classics—Casablanca, Rebel Without a Cause, 12 Angry Men, The Great Dictator. Enamored is not a strong enough word. I was in love. I found something that took me away from it all, made me feel happiness, passion, sorrow, pain, nostalgia. And then enters Damien Chazelle, who has blatantly built a career on nostalgia. His love letters to dying languages, both the movie musical and the art of jazz, are founded on the romanticizing of long lost art forms. I felt nostalgia for a time I had never experienced.
Now I have.
