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| France/Italy 1960 |
Jacques Demy's Lola is a benign Blue Angel, in which the eponymous cabaret chanteuse and inadvertent heartbreaker (Anouk Aimée) waits patiently for the lover who abandoned her seven years before. Demy's insouciant first feature – shot by Raoul Coutard in black-and-white Cinema-scope in Demy's hometown of Nantes – is also his most New Wave. Dedicated to Max Ophüls, Lola begins more or less where the more butch Bob le Flambeur ends, with a white Cadillac convertible parked on a French beach. American sailors roam through the port (seemingly played by French actors speaking phonetic English) and a sad young man, just fired from his boring job, seeks solace in an obscure Mark Robson movie with an aging Gary Cooper. This fondness for fantasy America extends to Lola's heroine. Aimée's romantic character may be named for Marlene Dietrich's femme fatale (and look like a ripe Jacqueline Kennedy), but basically she's playing Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return or Bus Stop—at once brazen and vulnerable, full of breathy chatter and giggly innocence. "There's a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness," she explains. In between café blah-blah and wistful set pieces, Lola toys with a blatantly underdeveloped criminal subplot, but Demy is far more interested in evoking the excitement of first love and old movies than orchestrating a shoot-'em-up. The sailors on leave have their own On the Town moves and Michel Legrand's score bubbles up under the most banal interactions. Like a Hollywood fairy tale, Lola is always threatening to turn into a musical. Its edge as a film comes from the fact that it never quite does. — J. Hoberman, Village Voice |
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