At the time of its release, Damien Chazelle’s romantic musical film La La Land (2016) moved the hearts of both the casual cine-goers and the discerning critics with its ill-fated love story of two aspiring artists located in Los Angeles— Mia Dolan (Emma Stone), who dreams of being an actress, and Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling), who is passionate about becoming a Jazz pianist and reviving the once revolutionary but now quasi-forgotten musical form.
The film follows the repeated, almost magically destined, encounters between the two in a passing on-the-road row, in a missed moment of connection at a restaurant, and then months later at a party before the two finally start dating. As the story develops, the two struggle to strike a balance between their romantic lives and career ambitions.
The film ends with the success of both Mia and Sebastian in their respective careers, albeit at the cost of losing each other. What is so poignant about the short-lived romance of Mia and Sebastian is the irony that what prevented the two from being together was their shared aim of pursuing their passion.
The struggle narrative underlying an individual’s pursuit of excellence is a staple Chazelle theme, surfacing in his previous film Whiplash (2014) as well as his immediately next film First Man (2018). However, key to La La Land is not the bildung gradually building up to some moment of success — keystones of these other two films. Instead, the film focuses on the trade-off between dreams — an ounce of the real for an iota of fantasy, an embrace-ful of magic for the stage-wide material reality.
But even seven years since its release, the film keeps its audience wondering about its ending where Mia and Sebastian are in the same room again — to be specific, in Sebastian’s Jazz club — after years of separation. An epilogue towards the end of the movie portrays all the could-have-beens in Mia and Sebastian’s life whether they may have succeeded and still been together.
However, soon the audience are brought back to the real distance between the expansive seating area and the dimly lit stage, between Mia and Sebastian, but not before a final acknowledgement of each other’s presence with an exchange of smile before getting back to their respective lives. Now, if like so many of us, you too wonder why the two parted lovers smile at the film’s end, worry not. We’ve got you all covered.
Why Do Seb and Mia Smile at the End of La La Land?
That Mia and Sebastian’s love story gets writ large as a vacillation between reality and fantasy is hardly surprising given the role each has played in the other’s life in changing it and pushing the other towards achieving their fantastical goals. The two meet each other when Sebastian was doing musical gigs after getting fired from the position of a pianist at a restaurant while Mia was getting rejected at one audition after another.
While Sebastian encourages Mia to write a one-woman play that would go on to become the basis of her first casting call later in the film, Mia’s presence makes Sebastian try his luck at a fusion Jazz band. Both refuse to let the other settle for something lesser than their dreams under the garb of practicality.
Thus, Mia calls out Sebastian’s joining a fusion band instead of pursuing his interest in pure Jazz while Sebastian literally pulls Mia out of her house and ensures she attends an important audition that would go on to become her ticket to Hollywood. So when at last they chance upon each other after so many years, standing on reality and gazing at a could-have-been fantasy, they smile for they both recognize this bitter-sweet limbo state that is part-and-parcel of any big dream.
Indeed, the theme of fantasy and reality extends across the entirety of the film. The audience of course remembers that the love story of the two began in the dreamy space of a theatre where Sebastian invites Mia to watch the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause about the troubled story of teenage lovers, showing the strong ties of their love story to the Hollywood romantic affect.
Thus, the epilogue of the movie, while it does bring in some major changes, also takes liberty with the depiction of time and space of events that actually did take place, hueing them with a more fantastical Hollywood reality. Again, the title of the film itself refers to an idiomatic space where anything is possible while at the same time hinting that this is what Los Angeles (LA) promises to all the aspiring artists who put up their shacks in its Technicolor lanes.
The tension between reality and fantasy equally draws from Chazelle’s commitment to bringing an authentical fantasy to his cinematic world. For instance, besides his obsession over realistic dialogues, Chazelle is known to have insisted on single-take shots of musical numbers, following the musicals of the 1930s, as well as the use of Panavision lenses in his efforts to mimic the CinemaScope (now unavailable) to the highest possible degree, all for keeping true to a medium that depicts reality through a rose-tinted lens.
Indeed, it is the film’s allegiance to the Hollywood tradition that makes its ending unacceptable to the audience who are set for expecting the happy-ending cinema in line with the film’s sustained visual aesthetics —the film is known to have taken inspiration from older movies of both the silent and the talkies era like 7th Heaven (1927) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) — only to stumble upon a bittersweet reality that Chazelle throws their way.
Coming back to the end scene, one observes that before cutting to the fantastic-real montage, the film shows Sebastian playing the first few notes of “Mia’s Theme Song” in a metacinematic manner and almost with a nod to the audience who had hitherto invested their emotions in their love story. When the montage breaks back to reality, Sebastian is (almost reluctantly) shown to finger down on the last note before gazing back at Mia, and finally, smiling.
The smile that they share is an acceptance of their love as one that was never meant to be and yet as one that undeniably made them their once-only-dreamt-of-but-now-real present selves. The smile Mia and Seb share at the end of the movie thus becomes a testament to the beauty of walking the tightrope of fantasy and reality that is life.