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Director: Jacques Demy
Starring: Anouk Aimee, Marc Michel
“Why did he say one’s first love was so intense?”
“Because it’s the first time, and it rarely happens again. And if it does, it’s not the same.
“Not as good?”
“Different.”
There’s a bittersweet sadness that permeates Jacques Demy’s directorial debut. It’s the cycle of wistful first love, which touches all ages in the coastal town of Nantes, France, that initially got me down.
Lola, despite its titular singling out of a character, is really an ensemble drama, full of interconnecting storylines. We have Roland, a kind, shiftless, young romantic adored by older women but focused on his romantic ideal – a girl he loved as a teenager. There’s a mysterious blonde man cruising around town in a Cadillac. There’s Cecile, on the eve of her 14th birthday, far too ready to jump into adulthood for her mother’s liking. There’s Frankie, an American sailor in port for a bit who is in love with his favorite cabaret dancer. And, of course, there’s Lola, the cabaret dancer who happens to be Roland’s old acquaintance. The connectivity between these characters, plus others, lends to the sadness. Roland and Frankie love Lola. Lola loves a man long gone, the America-bound father of her son. Cecile thinks she loves Frankie. Cecile’s mother, plus several other women in town, are (somewhat quietly) smitten with Roland.
It’s a somewhat bubbly movie to have come from the French New Wave, so the mood of the film, almost musical in its staging, hardly matches this bittersweet theme. That marriage of upbeat scenery with what is largely unrequited love is a perfect metaphor for first love.
There’s foolish optimism at play for these characters, and it’s a bittersweet (there’s that word again) joy to watch it unfold. Frankie earnestly pursues Lola, but you know from the onset she is somewhere else. She’ll have her fun with Frankie, but he is a string, she the kitten, and that’s all it will ever be. Roland, so uninspired by anything at the film’s onset, comes to life when he runs into Lola, and who can blame him? Anouk Aimee’s performance is utterly magnetic. When she practices her burlesque number, “C’est Lola”, which is more sexy beat poetry set to music than it is a song, do we have any more choice in the matter than Frankie or Roland?
She’s hardly just a sexy dancer, though. She’s more of an independent thinker than you’d expect a woman to be in a 60’s film, which makes Lola a breath of fresh air. Sure, she makes mistakes and has flaws similar to other characters, but they’re her mistakes and flaws. She has the power in the movie, and Lola isn’t about anyone taking it from her. It’s about her trying to manage that power she has over men, which she admittedly doesn’t understand. She’s smart, tough, and adaptable – the latter trait unsurprising for someone who regularly goes by what we learn is merely a stage name.
The magic of Lola is in showing us that this cycle of first love infatuation never ends. This isn’t a Frankie/Roland/Lola issue. It’s a human one, and we see that in various ways, best through young Celine. She spends a couple of afternoons with Frankie, doing innocent, childish things like reading comic books or going to the fair. The precocious teen predictably finds herself smitten. Like Lola, years earlier, Celine is experiencing her first romantic attraction, and the object of her affection is soon going to depart for America, perhaps never to be seen or heard from again. Celine’s character, along with her mother, so painfully obviously entranced with Roland, makes Lola more than a simple love triangle. It’s a web woven across the beautiful streets of Nantes.
There’s both empty reward and childish heartbreak in Lola, and not necessarily from the characters you expect. These characters will be ok once they simply let go of their idealized notions of first love. You know that, and they even seem to know that when imparting wisdom and advice to others, but they just can’t apply it to themselves. There’s a contrast between the young characters, all who seemingly have everything balancing on their current romantic desires, and the older ones, who have their desires as well, but find better things to do than live and die by the chase.
At one point, Roland says to Lola, “There’s a bit of happiness… in simply wanting happiness.” Perhaps that’s the mission statement of Lola, and we shouldn’t worry about these characters so much. The happiness isn’t in possessing what you desire as much as it is in the drive to possess. After all, Roland, even in his sadness over Lola’s infatuation with another, notably absent man, has more purpose than he did at the beginning of the film. Where he was more or less an uninspired zombie who shows up late for work because he’d rather stay home and read, now he is driven. The passion for Lola ignites his soul to win her over. First love blinds us and wounds us, but it also awakens us, and maybe that’s the point. If you’re carrying a torch for someone, you can’t be left completely in darkness.
Is it Watchlist-worthy? Yes. Demy’s film was lost for years but finally restored by his widow, Agnes Varda, in the 1990’s. The now gorgeously restored Lola encapsulates the infatuation of first love and the unwillingness to let it go.