There’s something infectious about the festival environment that distorts your usual critical markers for what makes a film Interesting or Good. After few days of watching nothing but low-budget, high-style independent films that stretch a short-form premise over a long-form narrative, you start to forget what watching a Real Movie feels like; you’re so acclimated to subprofessional cinema that the professional-grade stuff feels uncanny & alien. That’s why a lot of the buzzier titles out of Sundance or SXSW suffocate when they reach wide audiences at the multiplex. If you don’t watch them underslept & malnourished in a marathon of similar no-budget no-namers, you’re approaching them wrong. By that standard, the 2001 drama Lola entered my life two full decades after its expiration date, when it played at TIFF, Sundance, and Berlinale before being promptly, appropriately forgotten. Stuck somewhere between the anonymity of every festival since Barbara Loden’s Wanda programming one or two low-budget dramas about an aimless woman’s identity crisis and the anonymity of being the 11th most popular film titled Lola on Letterboxd, this film functionally does not exist. I only bought a DVD copy of it at a local thrift store because there was no way to legally access it online, affording it an exciting sense of scarcity even if the payoff was guaranteed to be mediocre – just like at a festival. There was a brief moment in time when critics & film snobs would have waited an hour in line for the chance to see Lola so they could rush out an early review or pad out the lower end of their Best of the Year lists. Now it’s just collecting dust at the Goodwill on Tulane Avenue.
Sabrina Grdevich stars as the titular Lola, a sweet but absentminded housewife who would likely be played by Melanie Lynskey in a slightly bigger production. Lola thinks of herself as a free spirit and an artist, but she’s really an anxious ditz who’s trapped in a loveless, hateful marriage that prevents her from fully maturing into adulthood. Her life takes its first-ever interesting turn when she saves an equally absentminded prostitute named Sandra (Joanna Going) from walking into ongoing traffic, and the two economically mismatched women become fast friends with potential benefits. The aimless, persona-void Lola is fascinated by the self-assured Sandra’s clear-eyed view of her own life’s story, and her attraction to the troubled stranger quickly escalates to a volatile mix of lust & jealousy. From there, the film borrows its cookie-cutter art film narrative beats from Bergman’s Persona (when Lola assumes control of Sandra’s identity along with her trademark blonde-bob wig) and Loden’s Wanda (when Lola completes Sandra’s mission of returning to her industrial hometown to reconnect with her grieving mother) without ever matching the purpose or potency of either reference. However, before the lost housewife crosses into a nightmare mirror-realm version of Vancouver by becoming her streetwalker friend, the film does have a visual & auditory style all of its own. The abrupt, rapid edits of Lola’s conversations & daily routine—intercut with sped-up images of Vancouver traffic—does just as much to convey the character’s anxiety & aimlessness as Grdevich’s personality-tics performance. It’s impossible not to long for that anxious energy in the back half when that tension unravels into rural peace of mind, even if the tonal switch is narratively justified.
Lola can be exciting, sexy, funny, or excruciatingly boring, depending on the sequence in question. The way its narrative structure forces it to trail off on the boring end doesn’t leave the audience on the most memorable note, but there are plenty of great images & ideas littered on the path to that letdown. It doesn’t help that Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar premiered at Cannes the same year Lola reached Sundance & Berlinale, steamrolling its attempts to craft a high-style identity crisis drama with much more powerful, longer-lasting impact. I was mostly fond of this forgotten festival relic, though, if not only because it reminded me of the many worthy, stylish dramas I’ve caught at New Orleans Film Fest that never scored official distribution: Off Ramp, Pig Film, Damascene, Three Headed Beast, My First Kiss and the People Involved, and the list goes on. Judging by that metric (as opposed to the Morvern Callar metric), Lola is a total success story. It was at least enough of a breakout to earn physical distro, which allowed it to stretch twenty years and one national border over to my TV screen. There are thousands of fellow forgotten festival selections that would’ve loved that kind of exposure and never got it, which is a shame whether or not they’d hit at-home audiences just as hard as they hit at the fests.
-Brandon Ledet