Leon is a stolid man
whose life revolves in a very close orbit around his
decrepit mother, with whom he lives in an pigeon-hole appartment in the
outskirts of Paris.
We join his story some time before the adoption of the common European currency. A virgin,
full-time carer, a slow moving comet who doesn’t interact with others, outside
of his mother, his entertainment consists of his observing passing commuters
from his seat at a café in a metro station. He also likes to steal his
neighbours’ mail and read their correspondence. When his mother dies
he is left alone in his appartment and takes to sleeping in
her bed and impassively watching graphic television advertisements for phone
sex lines. One day he notices that the naked woman starring in one such advert
is his new neighbour. Leon
becomes obsessed with her, and witnesses much of her life in the subsequent
years, unbeknownst to her, and narrates, or provides commentary on, her life’s
ups and downs, and makes a documentary record of her life, as he witnesses it,
in his diary. He does this surreptitiously, so she never realises she is being
monitored thus.
The scenes involving the phone sex ads, while
prurient, were the source of one of the few offbeat moments in the film, when
it is revealed to Leon
that his new neighbour, who, we have
seen, has just borrowed ice from him, features in them. At this stage of the
story, the viewer is still happily expectant that a more pleasant state of
affairs might evolve from the dour circumstances of the opening act - this
introduction to Lola is admirably economical and meaningful, for one thing -
but unfortunately such off-tempo moments are rare. Rather it would seem that
the director wishes to bring to light a universe whose prevailing mood is one
of lobotomisation, decrepitude, stagnation and affluence (in the sense that
affluence's surfeit can inhibit desire for the new)
and does so by sacrificing everything to the concept, in a way that precludes
off-beat, humorous or exhilirating scenes.
So, this is a high-concept film with a less than fully plausible
conceit and which
is also bereft of redeeming innovations, on balance. We get the impression that
the smallest fraction of the time spent preparing the film was devoted to the
film’s plot. It was while watching this film that the question of the extent to which artists should be
held to account for the work they produce sprung to my mind. Lacking
the vocabulary with which to tackle such moral questions adequately is a commonality I share with the characters
of Lola.
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