Though I really enjoyed the plot and songs of La La Land, what fascinated me the most was the overall layered artistic composition of the whole film. At first glance, the movie seems to have a typical and digestible front. The story-line is simple: boy and girl meet and fall in love. The main characters are simple: girl wants to be an actress, boy wants to be a jazz musician. The color scheme was focused around the 3 primary colors: red, yellow, blue. The songs are fun and catchy, the scenery is bright and everything is really sweet and perfect like a typical rom-com musical would be.  However, this seemingly simple base is what allows for the director, the artist, to attract audiences to what looks like will be a fun and enticing dream-like experience, while setting the foundation to create something much more complex.

To start, the movie seems to be set in two worlds–one in which there is real life, and one which is a fantasy of real life. Being a musical, random cuts to perfectly choreographed song and dance all seem to happen in the dream-like part of the reality, when moments are happiest and seem so perfect and happy or exciting that they almost couldn’t be real (think: “pinch me I must be dreaming” kind of effect). In contrast, the parts of the movie in which conflict or less-amicable feelings arise are usually more quiet, almost no music in the background. In addition they happen more often through the “winter” and “fall” chapters of the film (identifiers which seem to represent emotional seasons, not just natural ones).

The music and the colors in the film all help to set different moods in less obvious ways that also seem to sway the audience in more subtle ways–kind of like experiencing a feeling in a dream, where you can’t necessarily pinpoint your feelings because you do not have total control over what might happen next. La La Land really does a great job of artistically composing the film to create a brilliant effect on the plot and the audiences.