Takes your heart out to play it like a piano, and does that just right

Rating: 10/10 (16 April 2017)

In a sense, creating perfect films and perfect relationships is a similar task. You just start with the best, and then simply keep it up, never compromising, not a single mistake, not a single wrong step. In a sense, it's a technical task: follow these rules - and you are bound to succeed.
However, simply perfect is just too simple. Too plain. When you come to expect the perfection, you start taking it for granted, and even the perfect things lose their shine and become kinda dull. But how to create something perfect if perfect itself won't cut it? The answer is: you just have to wing it, turning your heart into an antenna and listening to what it's telling you.
La La Land does just that. And, technically, what it does isn't perfect at all. The opening scene is way too cheesy and orchestrated, the dissonance between the people and their song is tiny, but stingingly apparent. And you're already bracing yourself for another hyper-hyped ultra-colored hymn to itself. At that point, the film's all but a future disappointment.
But the perfect relationships are not a sunny day on a loop - what's more important is being able to make it up for the flaws and turn them into the details you'll eventually love as well. So, after having overplayed the bravado at first, the film becomes softer and more delicate, not miming its song, however perfectly, but finding its own voice, honest and sincere. A voice in which Mia and Sebastian speak to each other. At moments gruff, at moments insecure - but ultimately telling the most true story there is.
Right here is where most other participants take the smooth road to an inevitable happy ending. And the summer in La La Land is sweet and promising enough to deliver just that. But will the technically perfect thing be really perfect? Or even a sunny day could get pale if not the clouds and rain to be its counterpart? So the summer is bound to turn into fall, and, once inevitable, the prospect of a happy ending vanishes like a sad pipe smoker's dream.
But that's when we're hooked with no way back. From that point on, we want to listen to the story, no second thoughts, no distractions, there's only us and the storyteller. Like children who stopped squabbling and all want to know if the prince eventually finds his fair lady. Our emotions are already at stake, and the elegance with which La La Land took them out of our pocket is almost illegal. The thief doesn't even conceal himself, playing our hearts openly, and it's tempting to stop playing along and call the police. After all, the emotional manipulation is indeed a crime, even when it's so sublimely carried out.
Well, if you still had strength to resist, the last shreds of it fall when Ms Stone takes the lead. And it's not just her ability to act or sing, which was out of question a long time ago. It's how she takes the razor sharp blade of emotions concealed within the script, and pulls it out in one impeccable move, like King Arthur once did. And oh boy, don't you just start shivering at that moment, so bright she shines.
And just after that, it becomes really inevitable. The mastermind of this brilliant spectacle, Mr Chazelle, might be young, but when he's behind the wheel of a story he wrote himself, he doesn't miss. Every single romantic nonsense that we used to laugh about - like "and she felt as if those five years have never passed, as if she was right there, in that quiet restaurant at Christmas eve, her eyes on him, as if nothing else existed" - becomes alive in his hands, and he literally takes us on a journey others could only describe. The feeling you experience at that moment... it's pure magic, something that not only makes you forgive the pompous intro, but makes you realize that it was the only right start for something that led you where you are now. And that's when your feeling is finally complete.
Technically, La La Land isn't without a flaw. And if I was a grumpy old fart, I might've groaned on about it for a bit. About Ryan Gosling's questionable singing, or the plot's lack of complexity, or the ending being not what we might want it to be. But that doesn't really matter, after all, it's just technicalities. What does matter is what the film emanates - love. Love for art, love for those who dare to dream and dare to follow the dreams, who dare to be open and true. Love for life itself. The kind of love that shows the passion of the person whose heart that love flows out of. And these feelings don't just show off or simply graze you. They reach out to you. They ARE THERE for you.
And for letting me take that love as my own, La La Land, thank you.