Forward and Apart: La La Land
By Eva Rogovin
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016) opens with a colorful explosion of improbability: a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway transforms into a spectacular flash mob of synchronized song and dance, setting the stage for a film that successfully blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Beneath glittering musical numbers and heavily stylized nods to old Hollywood, however, is a story that resonates deeply with romantics, realists, and cynics alike. In two hours and eight minutes, Chazelle presents a simple reminder that life is both beautiful and devastating, that romance and ambition often cannot go hand in hand, and that love may not always be strong enough to withstand life’s trials and tribulations.
At its core, La La Land is a film centered around the duality of romantic fantasy and the weight of real-world choices. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone), who quickly fall in love after several chance encounters, see their romance unfurl in an intoxicatingly whimsical haze: a unified tap dance against the glittering Los Angeles skyline, a waltz floating among the stars at Griffith Observatory where they share a first kiss, and a spontaneous musical number at a jazz club. Chazelle frames these earlier scenes as idyllic, fantastical reflections of the euphoric beginnings of love, where romance is still grounded in possibility.
Yet, Chazelle firmly roots his characters in the acute pragmatism of life. With Mia’s yearning to land an acting role and Sebastian’s desire to open a jazz club, they are both put through the exhaustion and hopelessness of being young, struggling artists, both chasing careers that feel just out of reach. Chazelle pits moments of hardship against their epic, dreamlike romance, indicating the fractures beneath the surface and hinting at their love’s inevitable collapse. Mia and Sebastian’s shared ambition and occasional desperation ultimately overthrow their enrapturing romance, forcing them into decisions that pit their love against their aspirations.
One of the most emotionally compelling scenes of the film occurs over a simple dinner in Sebastian’s bare-bones apartment. The dazzling choreography and lush cinematography that once highlighted their magical romance are replaced by a raw, unsettling tension marked by dim lighting and a comparatively overwhelming lack of color in the frame. Sebastian reveals his plans to tour with a band he doesn’t creatively align with, which clashes with Mia’s artistic values and her frustration that he will inevitably become absent in her life. Her objections are concealed by an insistence that he should only do things he’s passionate about, but the couple’s dissonance is palpable nonetheless—at this moment, their dreams, once having gone hand in hand, stop coexisting.
Yet Sebastian and Mia’s love does not vanish entirely—it merely becomes tainted by the weight of their aspirations and the sacrifices they demand. It is still Sebastian who later ventures to retrieve Mia from hiding out in her parents’ Colorado home to drag her back to LA for the very audition that makes her career. However, their devotion to their respective art ultimately drives them apart, leaving them not entirely broken but nonetheless fractured. Mia and Sebastian are left to confront the painfully unavoidable truth: even the strongest connections can crumble under the weight of diverging aspirations, and they are left with no choice but to part ways.
The film’s ending solidifies La La Land’s dualism as both fantastically romantic and brutally realistic. Five years after their decision to break up to achieve their goals without holding one another back, Mia and Sebastian cross paths at “Seb’s,” the jazz club Sebastian has finally opened, complete with the neon sign that Mia had designed for him years prior. After silently acknowledging each other and their successes with reciprocal smiles so faint you have to look twice to see them, Chazelle delivers a breathtaking final sequence that imagines the life they could have shared together.
Mia and Sebastian’s story is retold and reimagined through a flashing kaleidoscope of color and music, and all at once, we see what could have been. The fantasy is absolutely gut-wrenching: a world where they sacrifice nothing yet still gain everything—most of all, each other. But reality snaps back just as quickly: Mia, now a star, proceeds to live her life married with a child, and Sebastian with the jazz club he now owns. They are both thriving, and also apart.
In other romance films or musicals, this lack of a picture-perfect ending may feel unsatisfying or incomplete. But La La Land, in having consistently highlighted life’s sheer unexpectedness throughout the film, is able to get away with subverting the traditional conventions of the romance genre. And somehow, likely due to Mia and Sebastian’s parallel successes in the end, we feel that their separation is okay despite not having actualized the perfect fairytale ending Chazelle imagines.
In their final glance, words are not spoken, yet none are needed: the weight of their love is palpable. It’s a moment so intimate and so crushingly realistic that it’s almost horrifying. Yet, Chazelle doesn’t paint their ending as a tragedy. It’s not that they chose a bad path—but rather that they chose the only viable one that kept them moving. The ending is a testament to the reality that even true love can be overtaken by life’s demands—and that choosing yourself and your future comes at a price. Like shooting stars on separate paths, Mia and Sebastian both move forward, but not together.
All at once, Chazelle gifts us with an irresistible film that authentically highlights life’s contradictions—its simultaneous wonder, cruelty, joy, and heartbreak. With Mia and Sebastian, he poignantly reminds us that love alone often isn’t enough, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be enough to be a stunning story, and one worth telling. Through its striking visual style and raw emotional core, La La Land invites its audience to grapple with a stunning paradox: we can love and lose profoundly yet still find beauty and meaning in what remains. It’s haunting, yet that’s precisely the point: it’s life.
