La La Land Review

La La Land was finally released in France today, it’s written and directed by Damien Chazelle, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

This movie has been nominated 14 times at the Oscars and 10 times at the BAFTA and won 7 Golden Globes! With buzz it’s doing it’s likely to win most of its nominations at the Oscars and I really hope so! La La Land is absolutely brilliant!

The opening sets the tone straight away – on the Los Angeles highway the crowd dancing and singing! It’s big and wonderful.

The music composed by Justin Hurwitz is fantastic, it has this lively rhythm that makes you want to dance. And the songs sang by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are beautiful. It’s so reminiscent of the style from old musicals and so is the aesthetic of the movie and it’s one of the reason it’s excellent. Everything perfectly fits together, the costumes, the actors, the sets, the music, the story and everything feels like a tribute to these old musicals.

The choreography is masterly executed all particularly with “A Lovely Night” when the two main characters do tap dancing and the planetarium scene. That planetarium scene is magic!

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling carry the whole movie, their performances are incredible and they have a great on-screen chemistry that works amazingly!

This movie is a delightful love story between a pianist who dreams of opening a jazz club and a aspiring actress who dreams to be a big Hollywood star. What unites them is that they dream big but none of them are successful and keep failing but live this happy life together sharing dancing and singing. Until Sebastian (played by Ryan Gosling) takes the job in a band that’s when his success starts and that’s when both start to go their own ways. He ends up opening his club and Mia (played by Emma Stone) ends up being a successful actress, both having different lives.

I absolutely love that scene at the end when Mia five years later comes with her husband at Seb’s jazz club and she hears him playing that music she loved and she starts imagining what her life could have been with him if it had worked like they wanted. It’s a compelling moment where you hear all the pieces of the soundtrack you have heard throughout the movie, one after the other as their lives goes by. It makes the ending at the same time lovely and a bit melancholic because they have both succeeded in their lives but they’re not together anymore.

9.5/10 An absolutely brilliant movie with an exceptional soundtrack and outstanding performances from Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling!