There are afew love stories in the movie ‘Lola‘ made in 1961 by Jacques Demy, but also around this movie. Made in 1961, it was the director’s first feature film, which a few years later would direct ‘Les parapluies de Chebourg‘ and then ‘Les demoiselles de Rochefort‘ and contained many of the hallmarks of an original and charming cinematic personality, an elegant romanticism, sincerity and ingenuity. But the story of the film itself has an emotional late episode. The original negatives were lost, and when it came time to recondition and digitize the film, the restorers had to resort to a copy in the archives of British cinema. The operation was performed by director Agnès Varda, the widow of Jacques Demy, a few years after his death. Demy‘s film, youthful and full of love, has been resuscitated and can now be seen and experienced by the new generations of cinema lovers due to the devotion and professionalism of the other great film director who was his wife.
The heroes and heroines of the film do not sing yet, as the heroes and heroines of the director’s later films would do, but they express their feelings spontaneously and with volubility. That would be a recipe for failure in modern cinema, and Demy was in the minority or even a unique exception among the directors of her time – but with him the charm and the sincerity of the heroes work wonderfully. The story takes place in a French city on the Atlantic coast in the decade after the end of WWII. The heroes belong to the generation whose dreams were cut off by the war: the cabaret singer who tries to keep her honor intact while raising a child and who copntinues to dream about the man who left her, the young man whose war experience changed the course of his life and cut his spirits, the widow who grows her teenager adaughter who is about to become a future Lolita (like Nabukov’s novel), the marines soldier from Chicago looking for adventures and memories for a life in the arms of beautiful French women. We are dealing with a whole world, a gallery of characters who live situations that are not very easy but which are approached and described with the lightness and exuberance of a suite of minuets. As in the French baroque ‘social dance’ with popular origins in the 17th century, the partners in the pairs change from time to time. The classical musical background (mostly Beethoven) envelops the whole atmosphere, and the black and white cinematography reminds that the action takes place in the decade before the film’s release.
The two lead roles are undertaken two wonderful young actors who followed very different career paths. Anouk Aimée creates a role in the tradition of femme fatale cabaret singers embodied over two decades before by Marlene Dietrich. Her partner in the film is Marc Michel, in the role of a disillusioned and disoriented young man, to whom the reunion with the woman who had been his first love seems to give the chance of a new beginning. ‘First love is the strongest’ could be the motto of the film, but there are also situations in which the first loves are not shared. Marc Michel acts great, he also had a physique that reminded me of Matt Damon half a century later. Where did he disappear after this movie? Examining his filmography we can see that most of his subsequent choices were commercial action movies, increasingly weird ones. An unfulfilled promise in a generation where competition was fierce. His performance in this film remains perhaps the best role of his career, contributing to this elegant film about the 1950s France seen through the prism of three days of romantic encounters by the sea. Only the ending can easily disappoint, the inspiration seems to have abandoned the screenwriter, who does not seem to have found the most suitable final tones to conclude his minuet.