Direction: Laurent Micheli
Country: Belgium
Year: 2019
Duration: 90 min.
Cast: Mya Bollaers, Benoît Magimel, Els Deceukelier, Sami Outalbali, Jérémy Zagba, Anemone Valcke, Adriana Da Fonseca.
Script : Laurent Micheli
Genre: Drama
Music: Raf Keunen
Photography: Olivier Boonjing
Producer: Coproducción Bélgica-Francia; Lunanime, Wrong Men North
Distributor in Spain : Elamedia Estudios
Premiere in Spain: June 18, 2021
Original version: French subtitles in Spanish.
2019: César Awards: Nominated for Best Foreign Film
SYNOPSIS
Lola, 18, with light blonde hair, lives in a foster home with Samir, her only friend. Impulsive and lonely, she is trying to earn her diploma as a veterinary assistant. When her mother passes away, her father Phillip makes sure that Lola will miss the ceremony. Two years before that, Philip was kicking her out of the family home: at the time, Lola was still Lionel; Philippe is determined to fulfill Catherine’s last wish: to be dispersed to the North Sea, in the dunes of her childhood home. Lola, on the other hand, is furious with her father, but she won’t leave her mother alone on this last trip. So they drive off together, both unwilling to share a car but determined to get Catherine home.
THE CRITICISM
“Lola is a film that tries at all times to understand the motives of both characters, their mistakes and frailties. It is not a film about homophobia, although it obviously talks about the prejudices that continue to prevail in society”
Increasingly, contemporary cinema puts so much zeal and focus on inclusivity and political agenda that it forgets about history. In most cases, these are works that are as loaded with good intentions as they are burdensome. This is certainly not the case with Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the best film ever made starring transsexuals. Nor is it of this Lola by Laurent Micheli. Yes, the protagonist is a woman transitioning (fantastic Mya Bollaers), and the vocation to document the process in order to portray it as faithfully as possible is no less evident, but Lola’s struggle for her sexual identity goes hand in hand with another equally important battle.
With a delicacy light years away from the tacky centennial made in Playz stridency, Lola must reconcile with her body, but also with her father figure (a Benoît Magimel, the remembered young man from The Pianist, in his best role in years). The obvious heiress of the Franco-Belgian social realism of the Dardenne brothers or of Érick Zonka, it is a hard road movie, with sordid lighting and coarse words, just like life, but which ends up making his desire to show the problem to the time that normalizes the trans world. Micheli, in addition to good intentions, knows enough about cinema to understand that characters are everything. Without them there is no story. Without them there is no message.
A brave approach to a current issue, with a strong emotional intensity that is transmitted through the extraordinary interpretation of Mya Bollaers.
Next screening:April 7, 2022
BEHAVE LIKE ADULTS by Costa-Gavras
Costa-Gavras is inspired by one of the most controversial and spectacular battles in recent political history, when Varoufakis, as Greek finance minister in a radical government, tried to renegotiate his country’s relationship with the EU, provoking the fury of the elite. political, financial and media of Europe.
