Demy’s film, dedicated in opening
credit to Max Ophüls, begins mysteriously as an American convertible, driven by
a rather cowboy-esque figure, cruises along the boardwalk of the coastal town
of Nantes. The cowboy appears only briefly
in this opening sequence, but his presence is central to the remainder of the
film, and his early presence sets the movie off. Some critics feel that the plots and
characters of the Nouvelle Vague are essentially interchangeable, and that the
films overlap too much in theme. While Roland,
the central figure of Demy’s story, suffers from many of the same strains as
other New Wave heroes, by comparison he is distinguishably plain, lacking the
charisma of the typical Jean-Paul Belmondo role. Perhaps this lack of charisma is why Demy
chose instead to title the film for Roland’s love interest, the gorgeous
cabaret dancer Lola (Anouk Aimée).
When the two characters meet after
years apart, she recognizes him immediately, but he hesitates, almost struck by
how beautiful she has become. He’d
thought of her only minutes before, but never was she so striking in his recollections. She’s thought of him often too, but in her mind
no man can replace her lost love, and the father of her child, Michel. In this regard, comparison between Lola and Félicie,
the protagonist of Eric Rohmer’s A Tale
of Winter (1992; # 52), is unavoidable, and indeed both women are content
to live out their lives waiting for the return of their former lover. But where Félicie seemed to engage in sexual relationships
out of a need for human contact, Lola finds joy in her trysts, even taking the
occasional customer at the cabaret home with her.
Roland spends much of the film
hoping that Lola will show such kindness to him, and thinks that perhaps she
may even be convinced to marry him. They
have a connection no doubt, but Roland has little to offer her but a friendly
and familiar face. He’s been fired from
his job, and his prospects for finding any type of sustainable or legitimate
work don’t seem very promising. He’s intelligent
enough, but lacks the responsibility necessary for any serious work. The audience is given the sense that he’s
read nearly everything in a local book shop, but that he could never be
organized enough to manage such place. There he meets a mother and her precocious teenage
daughter, and volunteers an English dictionary to be loaned to the girl. The mother hesitantly accepts the offer and
tells him to come by their home with the book that night, perhaps with
intentions peripheral to foreign language.
What strikes me so much about this
film is the interconnectedness of the characters. They don’t feel forced together, as is the
case with so many of the lesser hypertext movies of late, in which characters
who were supposed to have nothing to do with one another somehow are drawn
together in the end. The plot of Lola feels legitimately coincidental, to
the point where I was hoping for an ironic ending (of any kind) and not dreading
foreseeable connections. This is a strength
of the script that is complemented by the cinematography of Raoul Coutard, who
makes Nantes a city of dramatic angles and interlocking avenues in which this
almost fairytale coincidence seems plausible.
Equal praise should go to Michel Lagrand, whose use of musical
variations sets nearly every scene perfectly, with styles from Classical to
Jazz.
Lola
was Demy’s first feature, and though he went on to make other good films, and
the great Umbrellas, he never became
a superstar of the New Wave like Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer. Instead he’s considered a part of the “left
bank,” a group of directors whose films contributed to the movement, but didn’t
necessarily define it. Also in that
group is his spouse Agnès Varda, whom he wed shortly after the release of Lola, and was married to until his death
from AIDS 1990. Of the Nouvelle Vague
set he was the director perhaps most interested in the classic Hollywood style,
and while visually Lola is pure New
Wave, it does have the magical and dreamlike feel of old Hollywood woven within
its narrative…”with a little sex in it” as John L. Sullivan said.
Language:
French
Runtime:
90 Minutes
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