Dany Boon, Julie Delpy and Vincent Lacoste in Lolo.
It’s tempting to associate Julie Delpy entirely with Celine, the smart, clever, magnetically appealing and mostly uncompromising modern woman whose maturation we’ve witnessed, over three films and 18 years, in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy.
To preserve my own faith in humanity, I’ll need to hold on to this delusion rather than accept that any of her personality exists inside (or outside) the excruciating labor of love Lolo — in which Delpy stars, co-wrote and directs, negating the argument that this shamefully insipid romantic comedy is simply a project she adopted for the money.
Desperate for a laugh but utterly witless, Lolo plays like the sitcommy flipside to Xavier Dolan’s bracingMommy, with all of that film’s urgent cinematic invention replaced by pretty compositions in well-appointed homes, where ostensibly functional adults are reduced to petulant teenagers. They include Delpy’s Violette, a workaholic 45-year-old art director who possesses a staggering lack of self-awareness; and Jean-René (Dany Boon), an IT geek from the provinces whom Violette meets at a spa retreat and then begins a relationship with in Paris.
Though Violette has had decades of lovers, she quickly falls into the infantile traps of the virginally smitten — like sending a paranoid string of text messages to Jean-René after he doesn’t respond to the first one. It doesn’t help that her son Lolo (Vincent Lacoste), a 19-year-old “artist” still living in his mother’s Parisian flat, is an oedipal demon-spawn bent on sabotaging his mother’s every romantic escapade in a manner that is part Nabokov and part Dennis the Menace.
While pretending to befriend Jean-René, Lolo plants terrible ideas in his head (and his mother’s malleable mind as well), dresses him in fashion faux pas during his mom’s important events, secretly douses his clothes in poisons, plies him with drugged Champagne and infects his computer with a virus. But it’s pretty apparent that this country bumpkin with a sizable member (we’re not pretty to a visual, but we take Violette’s repeated word for it) means more to Violette than previous paramours — even though as writer-director, Delpy fails to instill the guy with any individuality, let alone chemistry between the leads.
In so many ways, Delpy is above commercial tripe like this. Putting aside her intellectually liberated work for Linklater, she’s made modest, insightful movies about contemporary relationships, like 2 Days in New Yorkand 2 Days in Paris, that felt real and progressive. Lolo is 100-percent phony and regressive, failing the Bechdel Test even with a woman helming every major aspect of the product.
For Violette and her nymphomaniac friend Ariane (Karin Viard), every conversation revolves around their insatiable libidos, with the characters speaking publicly and tactlessly about vaginal massages, cunnilingus, and the need to “get their chimneys swept,” even by provincial dunces, because, after all, “boneheads bone harder.” Later, in a moment of reflection, Violette confesses that “[Jean-René] dick saved my life.” Admittedly, this must have sounded revolutionary when Middle America heard it the first time, in the ‘90s, on Sex and the City. Now it’s just shock-pandering, without any of the actual shocks.
The worst tease of all is that good cinema haunts the movie’s edges, verifying perhaps that Delpy knows better. Violette suggests Lolo find her hidden weed in their DVD copy of The Birds. In a rare moment of calm, Violette and Jean-René snuggle up in bed to Village of the Damned. The lovers attend an art exhibition in which Chris Marker’s La Jetée screens.
There’s even an incorporation of Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz, whose sprightly introduction was cinematically canonized in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and which Delpy uses over … wait for it … a ludicrous fight between Lolo and Jean-René, with each man scampering indelicately around Violette’s abode, using a closed umbrella as a weapon. It’s an awful use of beautiful music, but at least it expresses something the rest of the film lacks: a sense of irony.
LOLO. Director: Julie Delpy; Cast: Julie Delpy, Dany Boon, Vincent Lacoste, Karin Viard; Distributor: Mars; Rating: NR; in French with English subtitles; Opens: Today at Cinema Paradiso in Fort Lauderdale