A visually striking experiment in counterfactual period drama, Irish writer-director Andrew Legge’s debut feature Lola takes place in an alluringly antique monochrome 1940s England of electro-magnetic hum, wireless crackle and cathode ray glow. Premiering in Locarno, this artfully retro twist on the found-footage thriller genre is admirably original, though often hobbled by limited resources, as Legge’s steampunk ambitions clearly outstrip his slender budget and still-raw skills as a novice film-maker. That said, if you can excuse its clunky first-movie flaws, this Irish-British co-production is still a conceptually bold and stylish exercise in lo-fi sci-fi, which wrings its dramatic power from rewriting British history while remixing pop culture in a playful manner akin to Back to The Future.
Lola takes place in and around London in the early stages of World War II. The Hanbury sisters, Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Martha (Stefanie Martini), are stylish bohemian inventors who share a grand tumbledown house deep in the English countryside. There may be bloody battles raging across Europe, with Nazi bombing raids flattering whole London streets, but these proto-punk party girls lead an idyllic life remote from the fray. Their latest top-secret creation is Lola, a towering tangle of wires, screens and primitive electronics that can somehow reach out through time and space, picking up radio and TV signals from the future.
Thomasina and Martha share strong anti-war principles, so they initially use Lola purely for flippant private pleasures, amassing easy riches by placing bets on guaranteed race-winners, and becoming giddy fans of David Bowie, Bob Dylan and The Kinks decades before the pop explosion of the Swinging Sixties. But the sisters grudgingly come to accept the heavy ethical responsibility of owning a machine that can predict the future. They begin broadcasting advance warnings of Nazi attacks, saving thousands of lives in the process.
Initially hiding behind anonymity, Thomasina and Martha are feted in the media as mythical guardian angels with uncanny clairvoyant powers. Even so, British military intelligence are rightly suspicious of the duo’s insider Nazi knowledge, sending suave officer Sebastian (Rory Fleck Byrne) to track the sisters down and crack their secrets. This leads to romantic tension and sibling friction when Lola is pressed into service as a game-changing techno-weapon with potential to bring about full German defeat. But classic sci-fi time-travel plot rules apply here, which means messing with future time-lines inevitably has unintended consequences, proving both triumphant and catastrophic for the course of the war. Good intentions lead history in some very dark new directions.
Legge calls Lola a “period found-footage movie”, which is an inspired notion, but this stylistic conceit too often proves an obstacle to the film’s emotional force and narrative flow. Clumsily contrived reasons are required to explain why a voyeuristic observer happens to be present with a primitive home-movie camera at every key twist in the tale. This close-up focus also has the added negative effect of distancing viewers from more significant developments happening off-screen, including major military operations and cameos by notorious historical figures. When tragic events occur, on both a personal and global scale, they feel almost disconnected from Legge’s underpowered chamber drama.
But for all its uncertain tone, underwritten characters and poorly delineated tensions, there is a fascinating film lurking at the heart of Lola beneath all the wires, valves and fuses. It is certainly rich in stylish visuals, imaginative production design and inventive cinematography. Shot in Ireland, it was mostly filmed on artfully degraded celluloid using vintage lenses, with the lead actors shooting some hand-held scenes themselves, and others captured on an antique Bolex camera. Legge and his team also do great work in blending scratchy old newsreel with freshly shot footage – there are pleasing echoes of Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019) and Guy Madden’s dreamy retro-fictions here.
Legge’s use of of music is another strong design element. Neil Hannon of Irish art-pop band The Divine Comedy provides a keenly observed retro score peppered with period-perfect songs, including some comically stern pastiches of David Bowie-style New Wave rock. At its most mischievous, Lola seems to suggest that accidentally erasing Bowie from the future would be a crime against humanity on a par with a full Nazi invasion of Britain. In one playful interlude, Thomasina and Martha becomes the toast of wartime London by passing off the future Kinks song You Really Got Me as their own jaunty swing-jazz ditty, which Britain adopts as a patriotic victory anthem. The Kinks also wrote a hit song called Lola, of course, just one of the allusive in-jokes scattered through this flawed but charming trip into the monochrome multiverse.
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Fuori Concorso)
Cast: Stefanie Martini, Emma Appleton, Rory Fleck Byrne, Aaron Monaghan
Director: Andrew Legge
Screenplay: Andrew Legge, Angeli Macfarlane
Cinematography: Oona Menges
Editing: Colin Campbell
Production design: Ferdia Murphy
Art direction: Vanessa Zanardo
Producers: Alan Maher, John Wallace
Music: Neil Hannon
Production companies: Cowtown Pictures (Ireland)
World sales: Bankside Films, London
In English
79 minutes
