Lola

This film, which sets up many of the story lines and themes that are taken up in "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," is as charming and seductive as the latter, even in black and white and without the musical numbers. In fact, the black and white is quite spectacular--the camera loves Anouk Aimée in particular--and the film seems as if it is going to turn into a musical at almost every moment. While watching the film, one thrills to see the first statement of director Demy's beautiful and poignant cinematic universe. "Lola" is at once a splendid homage to the classic Hollywood film, and at the same time, through its expression of complex, mostly tragic themes, and quotidian--if not ugly--realities, something much more intriguing than a conventional film romance. Yet, such harshness is tempered, even transformed, by the dreamscape of cinema, both in what is depicted on-screen as well as through the characters' own processes of dreaming. You needn't resist the temptation to call it sublime.

Jacques Demy's effervescent romance is one of the best and most enduring examples of the stylistic explosion since called the French New Wave, but compared to Resnais' often-tortured exposition and Godard's turgid socio-political cul-de-sacs this playful look at the mysteries of first love is alive with an almost irresistible vitality. Demy pursues with tongue-in-cheek determination the idea that life can be a series of happy accidents, weaving several interlocked plot threads into a delicate web of chance and coincidence to illustrate the casual symmetry of life and love. At the heart of the film is a young cabaret dancer waiting (against reason) for her American sailor to return, whose sometimes sad, sometimes comic story is oddly echoed in the lives of everyone around her. It's as if the world were an endless progression of dancers and sailors, destined to mingle and mix in a never-ending attempt to rekindle that first, unforgettable spark of passion.

There are a few love stories in the movie 'Lola' made in 1961 by Jacques Demy, but also around this movie. Made in 1961, it was the director's first feature film, which a few years later would direct 'Les parapluies de Cherbourg' and then 'Les demoiselles de Rochefort' and contained many of the hallmarks of an original and charming cinematic personality, an elegant romanticism, sincerity and ingenuity. But the story of the film itself has an emotional late episode. The original negatives were lost, and when it came time to recondition and digitize the film, the restorers had to resort to a copy in the archives of British cinema. The operation was performed by director Agnès Varda, the widow of Jacques Demy, a few years after his death. Demy's film, youthful and full of love, has been resuscitated and can now be seen and experienced by the new generations of cinema lovers due to the devotion and professionalism of the other great film director who was his wife.

The heroes and heroines of the film do not sing yet, as the heroes and heroines of the director's later films would do, but they express their feelings spontaneously and with volubility. That would be a recipe for failure in modern cinema, and Demy was in the minority or even a unique exception among the directors of her time - but with him the charm and the sincerity of the heroes work wonderfully. The story takes place in a French city on the Atlantic coast in the decade after the end of WWII. The heroes belong to the generation whose dreams were cut off by the war: the cabaret singer who tries to keep her honor intact while raising a child and who copntinues to dream about the man who left her, the young man whose war experience changed the course of his life and cut his spirits, the widow who grows her teenager adaughter who is about to become a future Lolita (like Nabukov's novel), the marines soldier from Chicago looking for adventures and memories for a life in the arms of beautiful French women. We are dealing with a whole world, a gallery of characters who live situations that are not very easy but which are approached and described with the lightness and exuberance of a suite of minuets. As in the French baroque 'social dance' with popular origins in the 17th century, the partners in the pairs change from time to time. The classical musical background (mostly Beethoven) envelops the whole atmosphere, and the black and white cinematography reminds that the action takes place in the decade before the film's release.

The two lead roles are undertaken two wonderful young actors who followed very different career paths. Anouk Aimée creates a role in the tradition of femme fatale cabaret singers embodied over two decades before by Marlene Dietrich. Her partner in the film is Marc Michel, in the role of a disillusioned and disoriented young man, to whom the reunion with the woman who had been his first love seems to give the chance of a new beginning. 'First love is the strongest' could be the motto of the film, but there are also situations in which the first loves are not shared. Marc Michel acts great, he also had a physique that reminded me of Matt Damon half a century later. Where did he disappear after this movie? Examining his filmography we can see that most of his subsequent choices were commercial action movies, increasingly weird ones. An unfulfilled promise in a generation where competition was fierce. His performance in this film remains perhaps the best role of his career, contributing to this elegant film about the 1950s France seen through the prism of three days of romantic encounters by the sea. Only the ending can easily disappoint, the inspiration seems to have abandoned the screenwriter, who does not seem to have found the most suitable final tones to conclude his minuet.

Demy's films of the 1960s laid out the whimsies, joys and terrors of the Nouvelle Vague generation, not through the parodic dissections of Godard, nor the eerie doublings of Resnais or early Varda, nor the rebellions of Truffaut's 400 Blows, not through encounters with malign authority, but through the networks of friendship, love and relation more often the terrain on which life is explicitly lived and experienced. As a kind of try-out for the musicals-shot as a conventional narrative film without sung only because of a lack of resources, but with a glorious Legrand soundtrack anyway-Lola is at once more sombre/sober and equally preoccupied with the same shadings of mood, somewhere between a feminist, or at least non-misogynist portrayal of an independent woman not subject to judgment, and the stereotypical figures that populate heterosexual romance. The use of locations as repositories of memory and of their own mythology-Roland's return in 'Parapluies' or the much darker return to the arcades in 'Un Chambre En Ville'-begins here. The Demy creed: "There's a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness". It's hard not to get sucked in.

LOLA is a wonderful movie. It may not have the intensity of THE UMBRELLAS or even YOUNG GIRLS, but it is the beginning of the Demy sensibility that came to fruition in those films. The difference is that in LOLA he takes more from the contemporary films scene, bowing to his peers as well as his predecessors. Despite criticisms, the effect of the film, its music and playful qualities, its excellent acting and camera, still puts contemporary films to shame.