{"id":638,"date":"2016-03-23T05:32:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T05:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=638"},"modified":"2026-07-17T13:52:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T13:52:36","slug":"la-la-land-review-ryan-gosling-emma-stone-oscars-damien-chazelle-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=638","title":{"rendered":"Love in the Time of La La Land"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I<\/span><\/p><\/div>

n a much-discussed New York Times\u00a0<\/span>essay<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in 2012, Christy Wampole wrote about Caucasian hipster millennials, whose \u201cprimary mode\u201d of dealing with daily life was irony and who were in \u201ca competition to see who can care the least\u201d. \u201cIrony is the most self-defensive mode,\u201d she wrote, \u201cas it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices\u2026 To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect\u2026 Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.\u201d<\/span>\n\nI read the essay again last year, around the time I was at a strange juncture in my romantic life. There was a boy and at the same time\u2026 there wasn\u2019t. We were in a relationship and simultaneously\u2026 we weren\u2019t. This ambiguity wasn\u2019t just a definition of my status \u2013 nearly everyone around me seemed to be paddling inexpertly through a river of uncertainty, grasping at meaning. Euphemisms, prevarication and subterfuge seemed to line the banks of love, strewn with phrases like \u201cBut it\u2019s only been a year\u201d or \u201cThis is moving too fast\u201d or \u201cWe are not there yet\u201d. Wampole\u2019s diagnosis of \u201cflagrant indirectness\u201d seemed to distil the essence of a generation\u2019s attitude and its carefully meditated waltz around the idea of love.<\/span>\n\nLa La Land<\/span><\/i>\u00a0resets the clock on directness, despite taking the form of an homage to the musical, despite being a movie about the movies. Mia is a struggling actor, working as a barista, spending her time auditioning for two-bit roles in half-arsed films and TV shows. Ryan Gosling\u2019s Sebastian is a jazz pianist, recently \u201cshanghaied\u201d of his funds and forced to take up embarrassing gigs. They are both beat because of life\u2019s petty humiliations, and they are both nostalgists \u2013 her room is full of old film posters, he wants to start a pure jazz club. When Sebastian and Emma Stone\u2019s Mia fall for each other, it\u2019s a love that is both simple and cinematic. It\u2019s not uncomplicated; it\u2019s just not complex.<\/span>\n\n\"la-la-land_2\"\n

\n

Musician John Legend speaking to Ryan Gosling\u2019s Sebastian in La La Land<\/em>.\n<\/p>\n

Dale Robinette\/Lionsgate\n<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\nTo be sure, it\u00a0is not a film where things for its leads are as perfect as the sumptuously composed frames they occupy. At one point, Mia gets out of an insulting audition, frustrated and on the verge of tears, drives by the Rialto theatre, and is reminded of her upcoming date. And suddenly, the day has changed. She hears a song over the PA system that sparks off a thought about Sebastian. And suddenly, she\u2019s lost to the world. This is what love used to feel like, before we dived headfirst into the age of irony and started to abide by an uncodified playbook.<\/span>\n\nLa La Land\u00a0<\/span><\/i>then, is a historical anomaly, an eccentric deviation from the mean, a bit of a square peg in a round hole. It is soaring and dazzling and gorgeous and all the adjectives that reviewers across the world have employed for it. But more than anything it is a romantic dinosaur, lush with a kind of pure feeling that does not seem to exist anymore.<\/span>\n\nWhen Mia and Sebastian move in together, there is none of the hand-wringing it must necessarily be associated with according to the modern-day dating manual. Doubts over \u201cmaybe we should see how we feel about a spare set of keys first\u201d are absent. It doesn\u2019t seem like the relationship where there will be distress over her leaving a bottle of shampoo at his place, where the shampoo will suddenly morph into a metaphor for assumed intimacy. I wondered about the scene where Sebastian casually asks Mia to travel with him while his band is on tour. In present-day Mumbai, he\u2019d probably have laboured over that option a hundred times over, done a couple of shots, and then finally chickened out of it for fear of revealing his actual feelings.<\/span>\n\n\"LLL\n

\n

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in Damien Chazzelle\u2019s La La Land<\/em>.\n<\/p>\n

Dale Robinette\/Lionsgate\n<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\nBut this is\u00a0<\/span>La La Land<\/span><\/i>, so people say what they mean, and mean what they say. There is a heartbreaking \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d in the park, possibly the worst response to a question about the status of a relationship. There is a \u201cYou know I will always love you\u201d freighted with so much emotion and coded with the end of love. The honesty in\u00a0<\/span>La La Land<\/span><\/i>\u00a0led the Evening Standard to\u00a0<\/span>remark<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that they don\u2019t make films like this anymore. As I watched the movie unfold, I wondered if they don\u2019t, in fact, make love like this anymore.<\/span>\n\nIt matters little if you don\u2019t get all of\u00a0<\/span>La La Land<\/span><\/i>\u2019s references, whether you compare its opening sequence to\u00a0<\/span>The Young Girls of Rochefort<\/span><\/i>\u00a0or to \u201cGoriya Kahan Tera Des Re\u201d.\u00a0<\/span>La La Land<\/span><\/i>\u00a0teaches you that a film that has been labelled an homage at best, and a pastiche at worst, can still be authentic.<\/span>\n\nIt all comes together in the film\u2019s lovely last sequence that waltzes through the chances not taken by its protagonists and the lives they could have led, doffing its hat at musical tropes and traditions through the ages. After my first viewing, I enthusiastically exhorted friends and colleagues to watch it in the company of someone they loved, curious to know who they would see in the montage: the companion they were with, or a forgotten face from the past.<\/span>\n\nAs the lights went up, I was one of 15 people applauding \u2013 I think I clapped the hardest. For La La Land\u2019s<\/em> romantic earnestness. For its belief in and presentation of a time when love was love, and love was absolute and unambiguous. When it was not \u201cwe\u2019re only seeing each other, not dating\u201d or \u201cwe\u2019ve been living together for two years but this is not\u00a0<\/span>really<\/span><\/i>\u00a0a relationship\u201d or whatever. I was really cheering for\u00a0<\/span>La La Land<\/span><\/i>\u2019s unapologetically sweet heart. And the idea that in an age of holding back, surrender is sometimes a beautiful thing.<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

La La Land reminds you of what love used to feel like, before we dived headfirst into the age of irony and started to abide by an uncodified playbook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[1181,1182,1183,1184,1185],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-damien-chazelle","tag-emma-stone","tag-la-la-land","tag-new-york-times","tag-ryan-gosling"],"yoast_head":"\nLove in the Time of La La Land<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"La La Land reminds you of what love used to feel like, before we dived headfirst into the age of irony and started to abide by an uncodified playbook.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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