This is definitely going to be an all time favorite film.
I'm so jealous of youth. And starry-eyes. And the slow flush of fresh love. And the beauteous search for meaning. And how love often means nursing your lover's dream, even as life chips away at it.
But here's the what-if twist - whither ambition when love is at your heart-step?
La La Land is lyrical, sumptuously accessible, filled with the cynicism and jazz-filled dream of Ryan Gosling, the liquid soul-mirrored eyes of Emma Stone. Emma embodies everybody's confusion, ambition, power and weakness. Both of them love each other so dearly that they desperately want the other to achieve. But what fuels incipient dreams also powers them to places they never thought they would reach. But then, isn't that the very purpose of life?
When both of them stop to catch their breath, to settle down to a simple meal, to figure out what their prodding the other led the other to, truths tumble out. Alas, as is the human norm, the only truth he sees in her mirror are the stories he's told himself.
Such is the persuasion and charm of this fabulous film, that in our involvement with the characters, we absorb the sublimal sub-text by almost missing it - longing for love or life can often take us to different places - both good, both compromised, both tragic, both qualifying as success. In the end, preciousness is what we have, and learn to treasure. However big the regret.
This is pure cinema, in its ambition to help us soar beyond our ordinary lives - without forgetting that the miniscule inside our hearts is an empire for each one of us.
This a movie to learn and love. One for the ages.
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