Lola

England, 1940, two sisters build a machine capable of seeing the future. A delightful novelty at first, a treasure trove of future pop culture and financial windfalls, as WW2 looms, they decide to turn their invention toward the war effort, only to learn that the price of such power can only come at a devastating cost.

High concept and low budget, Lola is a clever twist on the time travel genre, a parable about the irresponsibility and foolishness of indulging in unchecked power. Beholden to mix of familiar time travel story influences from Wells to Bradbury and Primer to The Terminator, Lola is a black and white movie, its story told in that ever-favored low budget style of the POV film.

Lola centers on two young woman, sisters who live alone in a country estate, their parents having long since passed. They spend their days in the idly lackadaisical style of the almost-broke landed gentry of England, strolling the grounds, reading poetry, drinking, and playing with the early cameras, phonographs, and electrical equipment that clutters their crumbling old manor home. Thomasina, long-legged in her suits and vests, and sullen in the eyes, is a mad genius. Martha is a ray of sunshine, twirling in her floral print dresses—she can also pee while standing up—and she films their frivolous days, using an advanced camera of Thom’s design.

Thom was able to build the camera because she also built Lola, a Mad Scientist-looking piece of cobbled-together machinery named in honor of their beloved mother. It is a scaffolding filling one end of their sitting parlour, a mass of switches, blinking lights, and curling wires, all sparking electricity and hissing static. When they turn it on, through the hiss and pop of the vaccuum tube monitor, they see and hear David Bowie singing Space Oddity.

Lola can intercept radio and TV transmissions from the future.

At first, they use Lola to make money, and enjoy the benefits, drinking wine and dancing about to Bowie and the Kinks. But as the Nazis ravage Europe, they make the ill-fated decision to use Lola to save lives. Listening to reports of bombings from the future, they send anonymous radio warnings that save thousands of lives. This, of course, attracts the attention of British intelligence, and eventually, a very clever and handsome young British Lieutenant named Sebastien Holloway manages to track them down. He convinces them to officially enter the war, and soon, due to the trio’s efforts, Britian is dominating the seas and skies, inflicting massive damage on the Nazi war machine. Throughout this, Mars and Sebastian are busying falling in love, all while Thom grows more reckless, more and more assured of the infallibilty of her work. At this point, anyone who has ever seen this kind of story before will no doubt be able to clearly see the brick wall of consequences the trio is hurtling toward. One mistake later, and the wolves are howling at their door, because carelessly changing the present has not just affected the future, but it has also inadvertantly provided the Nazis with a new path to victory. The trio realize their mistake too late, when they find that Bowie’s broadcasts from the future are gone, replaced by insidious synth-pop extolling the glorious virtues of fascism. Their once bright new future is irrevocably lost as America eagerly enters the Nazi fold, brought there by who else but its newly elected President, that famous fascist piece of shit, Charles Lindbergh.

The movie starts out with some white letter text on a black screen, reading: “In 2021, a cache of film reels were discovered in the cellar of a country house in Sussex, England. The film appears to be a broadcast recorded in 1941.” This is how you know that Lola is going to be a POV film. Also, as it goes on, it becomes clear that the film’s whole trick involves a classic time travel paradox.

But… if they warn their past selves of the dangers that lie in their past selves’ futures, and their past selves then make different decisions that then change their future, how can their future selves know to warn their past selves not to make the decisions that lead to the bad future? Do they just forever alternate between Future A and Future B, back and forth, back and forth, an endless cycle until the end of time…?

Best not to dwell on it…

Anyway, at 80 minutes, Lola is well-paced, ambitious, smart, funny, endearing, and interesting, and for the most part… it works great.

It’s not perfect, of course. Overall, it really demands your suspension of disbelief, but not because of the whole time travel thing either. Mostly, the problem here is that the film’s main problem is a bit obvious, right? Everyone knows that you can’t take future knowledge and apply it willy-nilly to the present without radically affecting the future you’re pulling that knowledge from, because doing so will only lead to radical change in your own future, change you have no way of predicting. It’s like leaping off a cliff in the dark… hopefully there’s water down there, but not too far down there, and hopefully it’s deep enough when you land that you survive.

It’s just… not a good idea.

The characters aren’t as aware of this, of course, but for the audience, it’s the kind of thing that’s just hard not to be aware of the whole time. At the same time, yeah, this is kind of unavoidable problem, so it’s not totally fair to put that on the filmmakers, they just have to tell their story the best they can, and we, the audience, just have to agree to let certain things go, but still…

It’s hard to not see the inevitable climax coming from a mile away.

And while we’re on the subject of issues that it’s maybe not fair to saddle the filmmakers with, but are still issues nonetheless, overall, the cast looks too generally modern for a film set in 1940. It’s their faces mostly. They’re all very attractive, but in modern ways, like if a CW show was traveling back in time to the 1940s. It’s hard not to see the Abercrombie and Finch model beneath those 1940s era clothes, y’know?

But, yeah, I know… that’s not a totally fair criticism. Still…

On a more valid criticism level, there were a few performance issues. A lot of this could be at the the script’s feet, as it generally lends itself to stage actor pontification overall, a danger that often comes when you have a small cast mostly contained in the same small setting, but there’s also often a histrionic intensity to the way some of the dialogue is delivered, as if the actors are projecting to the back row, bringing a feeling of “ACTING!” to some of the interactions that undercuts the idea that these are casual discussions being filmed at home. It’s fair to point out that the sisters are supposed to be somewhat unusually progressive for the time, raised by a pair of artistic, anti-war intellectual libertines for parents, and obviously, they’re so brilliant, they invented a time machine of sorts too, one that can potentially provide them with all sorts of new future insights and ideas…but even when keeping that in mind, the things they think and believe and talk about, a lot of it is very modern. I mean, did people in 1940s even have the terminology for the idea that gender is a contruct, let alone the idea itself? I don’t know, but it felt incongruous to me. This is something that often trips up genre fiction authors telling stories set in the past, that war within them between the desire to make their characters from the past seem “cool” to them, avoiding the problematic views of the era, while at the same time also making their characters believably seem from that era. It’s not an easy tightrope to walk, and most of the time, writers fail.

Which is what happened here… occasionally.

Bottom line, while I liked these characters, I sometimes struggled to believe them, and when this happened, it was mostly during times I felt weren’t strictly necessary to the story, like when they’re citing modern views while being rather performatively drunk and also claiming them as the sage words of their now long-dead parents…

But more than anything else, my biggest irksome issue was the characters’ continual use of the camera. At certain points in the story, it strains credulity. This is, of course, a very common pitfall of the POV style films.

I’ve mentioned this before, but a POV (Point of View) style film means that the camera is being operated by one of the characters throughout the movie. A subgenre of this are what is known as “Found Footage” films, which is what kind of film Lola is, as indicated by that opening text. The idea is the footage was discovered somewhere, somehow, and is now being watched by us to find out what’s on it, only to discover (usually) that the people who made the film are now dead, usually as a direct result of whatever it is that is on the footage. Think Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, Rec, Troll Hunter, Grave Encounters, or my personal favorites… The Wicksboro Incident and Lunopolis.

Also, as an aside, I would be remiss to not take this opportunity to warn you, should you find yourself interested in seeing more of these kinds of films… Never, ever watch Megan is Missing. Trust me.

So, anyway, like with zombie films, POV films are popular with low budget filmmakers because they’re generally cheaper to make, but because of that, also like zombie films, they can be unreliable genre. There’s definitely some good examples of them, but there is also an incredible amount of really, really bad ones too, as the most untalented hacks in the world only really need a couple of friends, a camera, and the motivation to tromp out into the woods one afternoon, should they decide that they want to make one of these. The issues often come because there’s a few rules that need to be followed when making a POV film.

The Rules of Making a Good POV Film:

1. Never forget that the camera is a character.

2. Make sure to have a good reason for the characters to be filming in the first place.

3. Make sure to have an even better reason for the characters to keep filming once the shit hits the fan.

4. Acknowledge and accept the fact that, no matter what you do, inevitably, there will come a point in the story where it will no longer make any sense at all for the characters to still be filming, and at that point, your story is done.

The main problem with these cheap POV films is that most filmmakers simply do not follow these rules, and end up wrecking their movie, ruining their own reality, and as a result, the whole project just falls apart.

Lola, at least, is one of the better examples. No one says “Why are you filming this” and “put that camera down” during the movie. There’s no frightened exclamations of "Oh my God, did you see that?"as the camera swings about wildly. There’s basically no point where they’re running and screaming, but the camera is shaking so you can’t see what’s happening. It doesn’t culminate in some dark basement or tunnel that no one in their right mind would ever go into, just to end with a sudden thud right before the camera falls and the screen goes black. There’s none of that. Lola is purported to be a mix of home movies and related newsreel footage, put together by one sister in a desperate attempt to reach out across time to the other sister, and that set-up works pretty well. And it mostly follows the rules.

Mostly.

There’s a couple times where the characters have the camera, an item that is so incongruous for the time period, especially as it was built based on future knowledge, that there is just no way that it wouldn’t be the only thing everyone in the room would focus on… especially when one of those people is a suspicious Nazi officer demanding to see their papers.

(“Meine Papiere, ich habe sie verloren,” I whisper to myself in my best Jason Bourne imitation.)

But… whatever. That’s a lot of complaining, I know, but none of this stuff was a dealbreaker for me, it’s just… I noticed it. Your own mileage may vary. I really did enjoy this film. It was overall fun and interesting. It looked good. I also appreciated the way the film showed how easily and eagerly a good portion of both Britain and America embraced fascism, something that is easily shown to be true simply by looking out your window.

Plus, the fascist synth-pop was a bop.

In the end, ambitious, a little flawed, but still very clever and lots of fun, LOLA is a really good piece of low budget sci-fi, a classic parable about the dangers of absolute power, with the added bonus of being a cautionary tale about the dangers of fascism. I really liked it.

Big thumbs up.