Lola

Thomasina on the phone

Back to the Future meets It Happened Here in Andrew Legge’s bold and original debut feature, Lola. What did you do during lockdown? Legge got out some pre-war wind-up cameras, threaded them with black and white film and shot a Nazi-inflected found-footage time-travel epic. Mad scientists are usually male and old but Legge’s heroes (if that’s what they are) are young and female, long-limbed aristo types fashioned after the Mitford sisters and played by Stefanie Martini, as Martha, and Emma Appleton as Thomasina. In a little preamble we’re given the found-footage set-up – reels of film found in the cellar of a country house in Sussex in 2021 – before we’re supposedly presented … Read more

Lola

Lola bathed in red and orange light

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy isn’t really meant to be a trilogy and is, in any case, in the wrong order. Take 1981’s Lola. Second of the “trilogy” to be released, it’s marked as BRD3 quite clearly in the opening titles. Veronika Voss, last of the three, was marked BRD2. Only the first one, The Marriage of Maria Braun, seems to be the right film in the right place. Here, BRD stands for Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany). As to the trilogy not really being a trio. It was never meant to be one, it’s just that Fassbinder died before he could make any more, in 1982. So who knows how many … Read more