LOLA

(Andrew Legge, Ireland/UK, 2022)

What if you could see into the future and change it – but then realise you have erased David Bowie in the process?

Time travel tales in Hollywood’s Back to the Future (1985) mode like to focus their attention on cultural fads and fashions: clothes, music, slang, daily technologies. (A recent example: Totally Killer [2023].) The ingeniously low-budget Irish sci-fi film LOLA has fun with all of that, but also investigates darker, more global questions like: what if Germany had won World War II?

Piecing together (more or less smoothly) an imaginary collage of interlocking audiovisual documents from the 1940s, debuting feature director Andrew Legge conjures the lives of two special, gifted and lively sisters, Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Martha (Stefanie Martini). Left to their own devices as children, they manage to create a machine that receives media broadcasts from the future.

In their personal, cloistered, punk-queer paradise, ‘Thom & Mars’ embrace the rebellious styles of an age to come – Bowie, The Kinks (“You Really Got Me” features prominently). But they also discover, when military personnel move in, that history is a dangerous game with which to play.

The ultimate question becomes, a little surprisingly: if mass media can change the world, can cinema miraculously restore it? André Bazin and his ontology of the photographic image (implicitly) to the rescue!

Just like the monument to bricolage created by its zany characters, LOLA is a sometimes inspired, jazzy conceit melding influences from Guy Maddin, Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) and Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver (1995).

It’s both a fable about history, politics and resistance, and a surreal romp through scratches, glitches and speculative possibilities.

Legge worked up to LOLA via two decades of shorts and TV work; we’ve yet to see a second feature appear from him.

© Adrian Martin 2 November 2022 (+ update)