Jacques Demy | 1hr 30min
Unlike so many other auteur filmmakers closely associated with movie-musicals, Jacques Demy was no American working within a restrictive Hollywood studio system – this is a French director who stepped up to the plate in 1961 with his enthralling debut, Lola, and thus began his own cinematic revolution contained within the larger French New Wave movement. While not quite the full-fledged musical that his later efforts would be, Lola is instead about as close as a film could get to being a musical without intermittently indulging in songs. In fact, there is only one number to be found, “Lola”, sung near the halfway mark by French actress Anouk Aimée. This song, much like the film’s title, is named after its leading character, who herself is named after the iconic Marlene Dietrich character, Lola Lola. Similarities to the German cabaret singer of the 1930 film The Blue Angel are abundant, particularly in Aimée’s enthralling performance as a beautiful, talented woman with a long line of suitors, receptive to their charms but ultimately unwavering in her singular focus.
The relative lack of songs should not be taken to mean that Lola unfolds with any less panache, vigour, or sensitivity than a traditional musical though. In the same year, 1961, Demy’s French contemporary, Jean-Luc Godard, also deconstructed the genre in A Woman is a Woman, similarly using an instrumental score beneath scripted dialogue to imitate the rise and fall of emotions conventionally expressed through musical numbers. But where Godard’s effort is marked by bright colours, self-awareness, and his trademark dissonance, Lola is far more elegantly muted in comparison. Demy would later indulge in striking colour compositions in his most famous musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but this is his first and only film shot in black-and-white, and as such it is rather through his brisk tracking shots, soft natural lighting, and rhythmic cutting that his delicate artistry shines through.
Though it is Josef von Sternberg who is honoured in the character archetype of the titular Lola, Max Ophüls is the one who Demy pays tribute to right up front in his opening credits. The Ophüls influence is certainly present in the way Demy glides his camera gracefully through his streets and sets, but it can also be found in his feminist-tinted meditations on fate, which underlies the form of the entire narrative. Whenever one character in Lola is drawn to another, there is almost always a slightly obscured nostalgia behind the attraction, with the object of their attraction often bearing similarities to a man or woman they once loved. The most obvious case of this is in the real past shared between Lola and Roland, an old friend she runs into by chance on the streets of Nantes. While he pursues her, Lola herself seems more hung up on another former lover, Michel. This longing becomes the motivation for her fling with American sailor and Michel-lookalike, Frankie, who himself strikes up a friendship with Cécile, a 13-year-old girl that reminds him of his sister back in Chicago, and who, coming full circle, reminds Roland of Lola.
Within this tangle of faint reminiscences, Cécile stands as the only one clear-minded in the connections she forms with others, having not yet been tainted by the pain of long-lost memories. When Frankie takes her to the fair, Demy draws us away from the immediacy of the moment in his swelling score and slow-motion photography, as if to turn this into a pure, nostalgic impression that she will never fully recapture. Though Cécile is one of the lucky few who can live in the moment without the burden of the past, the emphasis on the celebration of her 14th birthday underscores the transient nature of her own youth, indicating that one day she too will find herself pining after old memories.
With the ghosts of old lovers, friends, and relatives emerging in vague associations all throughout Lola, the physical manifestation of one such memory towards the conclusion seems almost too good to be true, despite it keeping with the tradition of happy musical endings. Why is it that Michel returns to whisk Lola away? Is this abrupt resolution really all that earned? That any of these characters who are so bogged down in bygone days might actually have a future seems impossible. As Lola drives away with Michael towards her new life though, the figure of Roland walking the opposite direction down the street catches her eye. And just as she has always done whenever teased by a hint of the past, she once again turns backwards to linger on what could have been.
This bitter sting in an artificially sweet ending may be a departure from the traditionally optimistic fare of movie-musicals, but Demy is not a cynic at heart. In his characters’ foolish devotion to the past, we can see his own love for cinema history, as he aims to evoke a similar joyous innocence to those musicals that inspired him – yet in holding Lola back from becoming a proper musical itself, and by adding in notes of such ambiguous regret, there is a purposeful incompleteness to this feeling. For Lola, and for everyone else around her, their nostalgic yearnings are never-ending attempts to reclaim a feeling that never existed, but as Roland reminds her just before their final farewell, “There’s a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness.” And just as that is enough for Lola as she moves on, it too becomes enough Demy in his wistful musings over his love of film.
Lola is currently available to stream on Stan, Mubi Australia, and Foxtel Now.
Scene by Green 