La La La Land By Damien Chazelle

Romance as a genre typically focuses primarily on a relationship and passionate love between a couple and must have an emotionally fulfilling and optimistic ending. The new movie musical, La La Land (2016), creates tension between ambition and love as it explores the conflict between careerism and romantics. Damien Chazelle directed this passionate movie in hopes to shock the audience and to tell a semi-dramatic story by indulging in the prospects of the medium. The deliverance remained defying and anti-climatic for those who watched the musical. This movie does not conform to our culture’s anticipations and defies all genre prospects. Chazelle calls our attention to the nonfulfillment of the audience’s expectations by telling a dramatic love

Most of the time, there is always an exception to a romantic movie. There tends to be problematic disputes between the couple, but somehow they always end up together. May it be fate or destiny, this notion is the norm for love films. The reality entails this concept not to be true most of the time; no matter how desperately the audience wishes for it. La La Land explicitly illustrates what could have been between the two love birds but what was not. These characters remained independent and did not require each other to make a living. Chazelle contends, “That was something certainly that the Old Hollywood movies had; those movies would always start out before the couple becomes a couple and you’d always have a sense that the music’s going to bring them together” (refrence Chazelle). Clearly, he displayed the opposite of this custom by ending the movie with the main characters separated living their own lives. He gives the audience a sneak peak of how their lives would have gone accordingly if they had ended up together, but it seemed as if Sebastian was the one who had to always drop everything for Mia. This little sense of hope that they could have made it work ends with a soul-crushing accurate conclusion that not everything in life is meant to be. The last couple minutes of the movie dwells as an imperfect,

Love films usually create highly unlikely circumstances for the couple where the two meet and fall in love at first sight. This circumstance did not prove true as Chazelle put some truth into the first couple of meetings. Sebastian and Mia primarily meet in a traffic jam where he is behind her and lays on the horn for an extensive period of time. Next, they run into each other again at a restaurant where he works a job playing the piano for the holidays and fired on the spot. She tries to give him a compliment and he ignores her existence, barges aggressively and directly into her, and walks away without any reaction or apology. Finally, they meet for a third time where she gets back at him for playing in a low-key, eighties band for a pool party and makes a joke out of it. He confronts her and once again marches away. The usage of a flawed character enhances the movie’s plot and makes it more or less refreshing. The characters cannot always be perfectly self-aware or always in tune with their lives; that creates for a dull design. Chazelle making Sebastian as disrespectful as he was to Mia switched the conventional genre to a surprising