LOLA offers a fresh spin to well-worn time travel and found footage tropes. In fact, the titular machine, created in the late ‘30s by a self-taught British inventor at the sprawling estate she shares with her free-spirited sister, isn’t a time machine in the traditional sense at all. Instead, with the flip of a few switches and calibration of a few dials, LOLA tunes into future broadcasts and displays them on her round screen. This isn’t a conventional found footage film either, but rather is presented as a collage of home recordings, newsreel footage, and (frankly) some dramatic scenes that would’ve been implausible for anyone to believably capture with a camera, especially circa 1941. And it’s all bookended by direct appeals from one sister to another— in an attempt to “stop” her, we’re told early on.
This Irish-British sci-fi film zips through the expected initial uses of such a device. Its creator, Thomasina (Emma Appleton), and her more artistically minded sister, Martha (Stefani Martini), are able to pick the winning horse in every race, and soon, money is no object for them. Mars becomes enamored with the culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s, watching David Bowie concerts, grooving to Bob Dylan and also citing Nina Simone and Stanley Kubrick as heroes of hers. But these aren’t the days of wine and roses for long—although Thom and Mars do go through an awful lot of wine. Britain is at war, and as the Nazi specter looms and then starts dropping bombs in its nightly Blitz, Thom grows obsessed with broadcasting news of the attacks before they occur. These advanced warnings don’t stop the attacks, but allow the citizenry enough time to take shelter, and, dubbed the Angel of Portobello by the press, Thom and Mars begin saving untold British lives.
When the military gets involved, the film takes a turn for the romantic, as an officer named Sebastian (Rory Fleck Byrne) uncovers the secret identities of the Angel of Portobello and begins to help them, falling for Mars in the process. As a group, they revel in the thrill of conveying Nazi attack plans to the British military before they strike, turning the tide of the war. And yet, Mars and Sebastian’s frequent escapes for amorous time together leave Thom to fixate on the power she wields over life and death and history, eventually going too far. As Sebastian notes, for the sisters, history stretches forward as well as backward, but Mars soon discovers an unpleasant consequence that Thom conceived of as a possibility all along: their intervention changes things they like about the future too. Losing Bowie, who either no longer exists in the future or perhaps “had a different childhood and became a dentist,” horrifies Mars and a rift is widened between sisters when Thom plays God with civilian lives. After a miscalculation, even the outcome of the war appears to have been altered.
Alternate histories, especially surrounding World War II, are well-traveled ground, perhaps most notably with Philip K. Dick’s Axis-dominated dystopian USA in The Man in the High Castle. But LOLA’s eerie newsreel imagery of Nazism pervading British society—shot on an actual ‘30s Newman Sinclair 35mm wind-up camera—remains frightening and compelling. The catchy fascist Brit-pop that replaces Bowie in the future is flawlessly executed to provide an uncanny retrofuturist glimpse into how extreme ideology can insidiously shape culture.
The lived-in feel of these characters and artful editing of a movie shot entirely on film presents a slice of a time and place that’s at once dreamlike and grounded in harsh cause-and-effect. Legge’s film, which he cowrote with Angeli Macfarlane, never wears out its welcome at a slim 79 minutes, and it builds up enough goodwill to be forgiven its few inelegant contrivances. The onscreen text telling us this is meant to be a film recently discovered in dusty film cannisters feels forced, and full immersion requires and healthy dose of suspending one’s disbelief at its many plot holes. But LOLA is more interested in stylishly providing an experience both intimate and history-spanning, which it accomplishes with great verve. For all its familiar elements—Mars even sings a loungey version of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” in front of an audience, which hearkens to Marty McFly’s “Johnny B. Goode”—LOLA is unlike many other films of its ilk, creating a unique vision that hinges on the intersection of seismic shifts in world history and cataclysmic interpersonal consequences.
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