I feel like La La Land is one of those movies people either passionately love or completely hate. And I can proudly say that I am very much on the side of loving it.

I honestly don’t know how many times I have listened to this soundtrack. I couldn’t tell you how many mornings I have walked to university with Another Day of Sun playing in my headphones, suddenly feeling much more optimistic about life than I probably had any reason to be, how many times I listened to Start a Fire and felt like the world is turning around me.

Then there is Mia & Sebastian’s Theme, which somehow belongs to a completely different part of the day. That one is for a quiet evening, preferably when you are already feeling slightly sentimental and apparently want to make the situation worse for yourself.

And can we just talk about Sebastian playing the piano?

I don’t know, man. As a born and raised heterosexual, even I sometimes have to reconsider things for a few minutes.

What makes this even worse is that Ryan Gosling was actually playing it. He reportedly spent months learning piano for the role, practising around two hours a day, several days a week, and the film did not need a hand double for those scenes.

So unfortunately I cannot even comfort myself by saying it was fake.

I also love how much of the movie is built around people wanting something very badly. Mia wants to become an actress. Sebastian wants his jazz club. And then, somewhere in between all of that, they also want each other.

That is probably the part of the movie that stayed with me most.

Spoilers from here 🙂

I think the ending is what makes La La Land much more memorable to me than it would have been if Mia and Sebastian had simply ended up together.

They both more or less get what they wanted. Mia becomes successful. Sebastian finally gets his club. And yet the person who was there while all of those dreams were still just dreams is no longer there.

Then Sebastian starts playing their theme, and for a few minutes the movie gives us another version of their lives. The version where everything somehow works out perfectly and they get both the dream and each other. And obviously the movie is cruel enough to take it away again a few minutes later. 

I don’t really see the ending as “they chose their careers over love” in some simple way. I think that would make it too easy. Sometimes people can genuinely love each other and still belong to a certain period of each other’s lives rather than the whole thing.

Maybe that is also why the music hits so hard. Mia & Sebastian’s Theme is romantic, but after you know the ending, it does not really feel purely romantic anymore. It becomes attached to something that happened, something that could have happened, and something that definitely won’t happen now.

Very efficient way to ruin a perfectly nice piano melody, Damien Chazelle.

And because I cannot write about this movie without ending with Sebastian playing it, here is Ryan Gosling making the rest of us look unnecessarily untalented: