Lola (1962)

Absolutely the worst movie.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

In Nantes, a bored young man named Roland is letting life pass him by when he has a chance meeting with a woman he knew in his teens: she's Lola, now a cabaret dancer. She's also the devoted single mother of a young son, and she harbors the hope that his father, who deserted her during pregnancy, will return.Demy made this film as a tribute to German director Max Ophüls and it was described by Demy as a "musical without music". One can certainly see its musical qualities (and it is no surprise that Demy would go on to be known for musicals). The names of the film and title character were inspired by Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film Der blaue Engel, in which Marlene Dietrich played a burlesque performer named "Lola Lola." We also see how skilled Demy was with black and white. Now he is known not just for musicals, but for intense color. That is all but absent here (and in "Bay of Angels"), but still his light shines.

This director is ROMANTIC! I think he rightly shows the astonishing contrast between love being generated by complete chance and fleeting encounter - with its lasting consequence and possibly enduring devotion. I just loved it. One of the things that is so winning about this movie (also true of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) is how very modest the characters -- and the movie - are. The characters are sincere - if they lie, they apologize later - and unafraid to say when they are greatly moved -- and when they aren't.I think both movies wonderfully portray mother - daughter relationships - and both are quite sympathetic to men as well as women. How often do you see movies that show the truth of men's emotions wracked by romantic feelings (rather than solely lust) - sometimes returned and sometimes not? Very seldom.In some ways, I prefer Lola to Umbrellas because the plot is more ingenious, the vividly drawn characters more numerous - so there is more to engross one. (On the other hand, by concentrating on just the love for one woman, Umbrellas creates an agony in the viewer that is more powerful than any feeling in Lola). Just see it - and you'll see many disparate pieces pull together in a wonderfully satisfying, utterly charming, wonderful romantic tale. Lola and Umbrellas make me anxious to see the Young Girls of Rochefort.

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 first feature is a totally unreal confection, a real movie-movie about characters living their lives in dreams and fantasies, all derived from the movies. It's a pure escapist film, shot on location in Nantes with Raoul Coutard's most dazzling black-and-white cinematography. Every character in the movie is tinged with magic, sometimes explicitly, as when Lola (Anouk Aimee) is photographed so that she's wreathed in light, or when Cecile (Annie Duperoux) has her outing at the fair and it's shown in slow motion. It's a deliberately "silly" movie, and that's what's charming about it.