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The innovations of the French New Wave were many, but one was the uncorking of sheer joy: joy in youth, joy in rule-breaking, joy in cinema. No film of the era is more blissful than Jacques Demy's
Lola, a bittersweet ode to first loves and missed opportunities. Gorgeously photographed by Raoul Coutard (shortly after his groundbreaking work on
Breathless), it's set in the atmospheric seaside town of Nantes. At the center of the interlocking storylines is a dancer (the stunning Anouk Aimée), who reunites with an ennui-burdened childhood friend (Marc Michel) but pines for the memory of a long-lost sailor.
Lola points toward Demy's subsequent musical treasures,
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and
The Young Girls of Rochefort, which together form one of the great happy visions in all of movies: a niche between workaday reality and a fairy-tale world in which everything works out exactly as it should.
--Robert Horton
Video Details
Anouk Aimée (A Man and a Woman) delivers a groundbreaking performance in the title role of Lola. Left by her sailor lover Michel (Jacques Harden), on the eve of her pregnancy seven years ago, Lola brings up their son while working as a dancer in a sailor's café. She anxiously awaits the return of Michel, who has gone to America to seek his fortune. In his absence, Lola spends time in the company of her childhood friend Roland (Marc Michel), and an American sailor Frankie (Alan Scott). She is a woman searching for love and would settle down with one of them if her heart did not belong to Michel
Jacques Demy's gorgeously shot B&W debut film is a loving tribute to Max Ophüls that has now been restored to radiant form under the supervision of his widow, award-winning filmmaker Agnès Varda.