Leighton Trent’s review published on Letterboxd:
This may only be my second one, but there seem to be few thing things more life-affirming, more exultant, more kaleidoscopic in color and more swooningly romantic than a Jacques Demy musical.
The moment in La La Land where Damien Chazelle tests our suspension of disbelief as Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are quite literally carried away by their romance into the air as they are dancing is what should happen to any of us when we're watching a Jacques Demy film. I feel as though for two hours here he was carrying me up into the stars with him, a trapeze artist of a storyteller, songwriter and director suspending me within the heavens of romance and never letting me come back down again until his story was finished.
A day later and I still haven't come back down... Hell, I don't ever want to come down again! By the next time I watch this I will have become fluent in French so that I won't ever have to divert my eyes downward again to read subtitles when they should be solely focused on every single movement in every single glorious frame of what has to be as close to perfect as musicals can get.
***The cheery, effervescent murder subplot songs (the victim being "cut down to size") are really just a slightly macabre cherry on top of a perfect sundae that made me love this film even more.
