 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: LOLA • Year: 2022 • Country: Ireland, United Kingdom • Director: Andrew Legge • Main cast: Stefanie Martin, Emma Appleton, Rory Fleck Byrne, Hugh O’Conor • Runtime: 79 minutes • Production company: Cowtown Pictures, Head Gear Films, Kreo Films FZ, Metrol Technology • TRAILER
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When the screen faded to black by the sound of David Bowie stating the risks of LOLA to come, just for a moment, I thought that I was watching a trailer. The movie’s first five minutes were gone without even noticing. Little did I know that that feeling would follow me for the whole movie. Indeed, Andrew Legge’s sci-fi mockumentary develops at a breakneck pace. And not only that. A thrilling rhythm, an appealing vintage aesthetic, a good portion of humor, and some memorable musical numbers turn LOLA into a pop culture sci-fi bomb, whose trepidant narrative does not always manage to cover the gaps that its pace unavoidably leaves open.
LOLA (2022) starts off with an easy premise: changing the past will change our future. The story revolves around sisters Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Martha Hanbury (Stefanie Martini), who have just built a unique broadcasting machine, one that will allow them to anticipate the future and therefore transform the world. With World War II escalating, the sisters initially decide to apply the device as a weapon of intelligence unfolding the whole movie’s potential: a reflection about nostalgia, about the risks of living in the past, a homage to movies and the power of film for an exhilarating time-travel mockumentary. Some might say, it is all over the place, but it’s exactly this dispersion that makes LOLA (2022) one of its kind.
Combining historic footage with black and white homelike recordings and an amazing soundtrack allows LOLA (2022) to approach the II World War setting from a pop perspective, that reminds at some points of comedy-drama Jojo Rabbitt (2019) and with its Germanized Beatles and Bowie soundtrack. A pop Third Reich is also nothing new, even Bowie dressed himself as a nazi during his Berlin days of milk and coke. But LOLA (2022) does not doubt to approach this setting with a good portion of humor, that comes through some witty dialogues but also from the concept itself. Ultimately LOLA (2022) is a film pointing to the risks of nostalgia while exploiting it for their own purposes. Far away from being an inconsistency, this is a sign of the movie’s irreverent character. Nonetheless, the way it portrays pop culture does come off as inconsistent sometimes.
Shortly after discovering LOLA, the Hanbury sisters become big pop fanatics. We follow them jumping from one pop icon to another: from Bowie, to Dylan, to The Kinks, like a list of 20th-century music icons with little criteria. The selection could have been done as a bizarre summer mix made by my grandma. This randomness could have been insignificant if it wasn’t because it ends up permeating the whole film. We skip and jump with no time to digest, but LOLA (2022) has lots of things to tell and little time to take care of. As we jump from one icon to another, we speed up scenes to get immediately to the climax. While this fast pace is definitely a resource that fits well with the time-travel topic, it might give the feeling of being in a washing machine of alternative history that inevitably ends up in a huge and spectacular deus ex machina. Too much acceleration just makes the narrative look confusing, inconsistent and what’s worse, gives the feeling of an underdeveloped or even unfinished script, in an otherwise clever and engaging story.
As Martha’s character calls his sister Thomasina psychotic, I could not help but laugh, as this is exactly what the movie is once you are in. A psychotic, thrilling, crazy story about time, nostalgia with delicious characters and quirky ways. In spite of all its failures, what remains at the end credits is its biggest strength: the fact that it’s plainly impossible to get bored with it.
RATE: 7/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11366674
