Lolo - Drei ist einer zu viel

Violette (Julie Delpy) is a 45 year old modern Parisen high-powered fashion producer. She is divorced with teen son Eloi nicknamed Lolo. She can't find a good man anywhere and has given up. Her flirtatious friend Ariane pulls her into a spa vacation in the country. They meet up a couple of guys and she starts dating naive nice guy Jean-René Graves. He's also divorced with a child and little experience in dating. Outwardly, Lolo is chummy with JR but secretly, he's working to sabotage the relationship.

Anything with Delpy is elevated by her presence. She needs a charismatic lead to be her opposite. The character may be bland but the actor shouldn't be. Lolo's evil ways are funny at first but the ending turns too dark. As the director, Delpy needs to maintain the tone better than that. Lolo becomes less comedic and more psycho. This has Delpy and a little fun but not that great.

I've seen Lolo before. A young man raised by a single mother does not like it when eligible suitors comes sniffing around his MILF. So when a IT tech becomes his mother's love interest, Lolo stops at nothing to break these two apart.

The french version of this story starts out as just a young man talking crap to convince his mom that this man is not right for her. Then it escalates to the extreme when Lolo makes The IT tech his victim. That's were the comedy comes it as well.

It's not different from an American comedy in how it escalates, except that the this french film realizes it does not need to got too over the top with the comedy to be laugh out loud funny.

If you ever seen such movie as Cyrus or Mr. Woodcock than you'll like this movie. It's the same style of comedy.

One exception is the focus on the perspective of Julie Delpy's character, Violette, a 40 year old woman who still in the dating game looking for love. I seen the movie done from Lolo's perspective as the selfish son who will do anything to keep the cord attached to his mother, and I've seen it from Jean-René's perceptive as a man dating a woman too good to be true, and then discovers she got some baggage she loves too much too see as baggage. Violette's view does bring some freshness to the movie.

It was a subtle comedy, at least by American standards, but it is very effective.

Un film français ! Co-writer, director, and starring Julie Delpy! She's Violette, in the fashion industry. She meets a fisherman, and accepts an invitation to a party. Turns out he's really a nice computer guy, and they start dating. But there's a hitch... Violette's son Lolo (Vincent Lacoste) doesn't like the new guy, so he starts doing things to bust them up. And he makes his own mother so paranoid, she starts acting weird around the new guy, JeanRene (Dany Boon). After this goes on for a while, we can only hope that Violette stops blaming JeanRene. Of course, the son is loving every minute of the misunderstandings and screw-ups. Will mom ever catch on? Delpy was an actor for YEARS before she began directing. Shared oscar nominations for Before Midnight and Before Sunset. This one is okay. Like a (really long) episode of three's company. So many misunderstandings... orchestrated by the son.

There has been no shortage of Oedipal offspring hellbent on disrupting their parents' lives in comedies of all nationalities. Dutch director Alex van Warmerdam probably handled this tricky subject matter best in his 1986 landmark farce ABEL, pulling double duty by also playing the titular thirty-pushing tyke whose refusal to vacate the homestead wreaks all sorts of increasingly surreal havoc. A huge success in the Netherlands, it firmly established the young filmmaker's reputation through festival screenings around the world, begetting the remarkably similar if decidedly more benign French film TANGUY (2001, Etienne Chatiliez) as a direct result.

Continuing the trend, as well as an intriguing directorial career that has yet to shift into high gear, is Continental art-house cinema actress Julie Delpy with what is already her sixth full length feature, also just the second of these (after her exercise in "fantastique", THE COUNTESS) not to register as a total blab-fest. Don't get me wrong, LOLO (which bears a strong if unacknowledged resemblance to the Duplass Brothers' CYRUS from a few years prior) still has characters yakking it up at regular intervals but these streams of (often scintillating) dialogue usually propel the plot forward at almost breakneck speed, making for a most enjoyable hour and a half. What surprised me most, which may qualify as a leftover from Delpy's recent dabbling in horror cinema, was just how far into darkness the director seemed prepared to take her subject matter in its final stages.

Taking a richly deserved spa holiday in scenic Biarritz with foul-mouthed best friend Ariane (the indomitable Karin Viard in fine form) in tow, forty-something fashion editor Violette (Delpy) finds herself falling unexpectedly in love with local kind-hearted divorced IT specialist Jean-René (Dany Boon) who's already planning to relocate to Paris. Although at the top of his profession, Jean still registers as the French equivalent of a redneck to Paris natives and Violette frets about whether he'll fit in with her image-obsessed crowd.

What she doesn't realize is that the greatest threat to their newfound happiness lies closer to or more accurately inside the home : her 19-year old son Eloi, affectionately known as Lolo, an endearment he definitely doesn't deserve. Portrayed by fresh French heartthrob Vincent Lacoste who became an instant star thanks to Riad Sattouf's 2009 surprise smash LES BEAUX GOSSES (a/k/a THE FRENCH KISSERS), it's easy to see how this charming viper has managed to pull the wool over his mother's eyes for so long, but once there's a man moving in on his territory (a trend that's belatedly revealed as having started with his proper dad) the fangs come out. The pestering starts out innocently enough, the brat pouring itching powder on Jean's clothes (leading to a ridiculously thorough medical exam when Violette suspects he might have what was once euphemistically called a social disease), but soon increases to epic proportions.

This kind of character-based comedy can fall flat on its face without the right actors to carry it. Fortunately, the casting is practically flawless down to the smallest parts, such as the priceless Nicolas Wanczycki (from TV's THE RETURNED) as an unintentionally droll doctor in the hospital emergency room. Delpy can do neurotic as well as Diane Keaton, minus the mannerisms which sometimes mar the latter's artistic achievements, though another director could have conceivably prevented her from the occasional spot of overacting. Audience favorite Dany Boon (who broke all local box office records with BIENVENUE CHEZ LES CH'TIS) might seem like an odd choice to pair up with the highbrow Delpy but his work in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's underrated MICMACS A TIRE-LARIGOT already showed the actor was capable of far more subtlety than his endless string of rowdy crowd-pleasers suggested. His casting actually proves a shrewd move on Delpy's part, an insidious tactic to draw in the punters who usually stay away in droves from her movies.

Visually way more refined than your average point and shoot French farce, courtesy of the venerable Thierry Arbogast (who photographed most of Luc Besson's stuff), LOLO further ups the ante with an eclectic series of soundtrack selections. These range from Andy Williams's irresistible toe-tapper Music to Watch Girls Go By (playing over terrific animated opening credits) to Max Steiner's syrupy Theme from A Summer Place and Etta James belting out Plum Nuts over the end scroll.

I'm a Julie Delpy fan, "Two days in Paris" is one of my favourite movies of all times. This film, however, is impossible to watch.

It's incredibly predictable, the humour is silly and you've seen all the gags in plenty of (bad) films before.

The storyline is not credible at all. Even if you're not looking for sophisticated humour, just want some slapstick laughs, this film is simply not very funny. I watched it in the dubbed version, maybe it's slightly better in the French original, although to be honest, I don't think so, given how bad the storyline and the jokes are.

The acting is OK, but it can't save the film.