LOLA review - stylish monochrome drama posits an alternative World War Two

Sometimes one admires a film without wholly loving it because the high level of craft displayed on screen holds at arms’ length emotional engagement with the story. LOLA is that kind of movie – an ingeniously devised tale of time-travel, set in 1941 and replete with World War Two newsreels that have been altered with all the digital skills its makers could summon.

It’s not quite deepfake, but the result is impressive and intriguing, even if all this dazzling artifice gets in the way of connecting with the central characters.

Stefani Martini and Emma Appleton play a pair of orphaned sisters, Martha and Thomasina. Posh, clever, and beautiful, they have had no formal education but somehow Thomasina has invented a Heath Robinson-esque machine that can pick up airwaves from any date in the future. Radio broadcasts and television shows from the Sixties and Seventies are all available at the spin of a dial. 

LOLA opens with scratchy images and captions stating that what we are about to see is found footage discovered in 2021 in a house in Sussex. Tracking round the wrecked property, Martha claims she is making the film as a warning to the missing Thomasina. What has driven the sisters apart forms the backbone of the movie. (Pictured below: Emma Appleton)

At first their time machine, dubbed LOLA, brings them riches. The sisters make a fortune betting on known winners from future horse races. LOLA gives them glimpses of an enthralling, culturally revolutionary future. Though the girls live in 1941, they use their device to watch David Bowie’s Major Tom sending his SOS to ground control. LOLA  also enables them to transmit anonymous warnings about future targets in the Blitz. 

The sisters realise that they have the power to make, and unmake, history; they become heroines to the thousands of people they save from imminent air raids. The British authorities want to know not only how they are getting their advance information but also the cunning means by which they are transmitting warnings across the country. Soon army intelligence officers have cracked the sisters’ anonymity and are knocking at the front door.  A little romance and a lot of fame ensue. 

There’s pleasure to be had in Martha‘s rendering of the Kinks classic "You Really Got Me". She turns it into a wartime singalong hit, over 20 years before it was recorded. The whirl of altered newsreels and invented headlines signal a speedy victory to the Allies. But as anyone who has ever seen Looper, La Jeteé, or Back to the Future knows, altering the future has consequences for the present – and they are not always desirable. Thomasina’s genius has a darker side – and the Germans are interested in LOLA, too.

Using 35mm monochrome film stock, cinematographer Oona Menges has done a superb job of creating the look of the period. Some of Lola was shot using a 16mm handheld Bolex camera by actress Martini, which adds to the found footage flavour.  

This is the feature debut of writer-director Andrew Legge, who previously made three low-budget short films  featuring machines that could alter time or involved archival fakery. He has had time to expand on those themes in the 79-minute Lola and to enhance them with a sly score and songs by Neil Hannon of the chamber pop group The Divine Comedy. In this alternative future, David Bowie has been replaced with a pop star with his own fascist groove thang – a Kraftwerk-style banger is delivered in a Bowie-esque voice by an actor who mouths lines like "do not fraternise, with radicals and perverts, learn to march in time…" 

At times Legge’s inventive and playful aesthetic – his tinkering with the veracity of film as historical artefact  – reminded me of Peter Jackson’s early spoof documentary Forever Silver, Woody Allen’s Zelig, and the films of the maverick Canadian auteur Guy Maddin. In an era when so many movies are remakes or adaptations of existing fictions and tread a conventional path, it’s heartening to see a director taking off on his own tangent even if sometimes Lola strays into music and montage sequences at the expense of a clearer narrative. 

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