Lola (1961)

Saw Lola, a film by Jacques Demy, who is most famous for directing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a musical about a woman reuniting with her long-lost lover not altogether happily.  In keeping with that film's theme of love sort of vs life, this film is about doomed, innocent love, juxtaposed with the trappings of tawdry sleeze.

The film follows a couple of people as they meet and interact with each other.  There's the titular Lola who is a cabaret dancer, Roland who is a bored young man with nothing but time on his hands, Frankie, an American sailor in town for some fun, and young Cecile, a girl in a hurry to grow up with her single mother.  These characters - show girls, sailors, bored handsome young men, teenage schoolgirls, are the archetypes of pornography and there's even a reference to the novel Justine by the Marquis De Sade.  Despite all of this however, everything is kept mostly innocent and kind of sweet.  It may have been quite risque for its time but it's tame enough now to see with one's mother.

The theme of the film is doomed love.  The prostitute Lola hopelessly loves her one-time boyfriend.  The innocent young man Roland burns a candle for Lola, and the schoolgirl has a crush on the sailor who treats her with the restrained affection of a father who she never had.  It's all very surprisingly sweet, a sort of inversion of most of these stories involving the sex trade.  Instead of moralistically ending on a down note, the film mines sincerity and hope out of these depths.  As one character neatly sums things up: "there's some happiness to be had just in hoping for happiness."

The film is French and filmed in the 1960s.  It's an interesting film, but was not quite what I was in the mood for, alas.  I was too young and snobby to really enjoy Umbrellas of Cherbourg and (alas) I think this one also missed me by a bit.  I enjoyed the uplifting attitude of the film, and I guess I can recommend it to anyone out there who has a hankering for 60s-era non-new wave, but was a bit dusty for me - a bit homework-ish.