Lola, the directorial debut of 29-year-old American actress Nicola Peltz Beckham, is a movie predestined for mockery. Peltz Beckham — the daughter of billionaire hedge-fund CEO Nelson Peltz and daughter-in-law of David and Victoria Beckham — has made a hazy, pastel-toned, plot-lite-vibe-heavy coming-of-age film about Lola, the working-class store clerk and stripper whom she also portrays. It’s not a law that directors making slice-of-life flicks must be personally familiar with the material they are depicting, but before even watching Lola, the disconnect between the dead-end world the film takes place in and Peltz Beckham’s background stands out as jarring. One can’t help but feel that the project is doomed from the get-go because it is conceptually untenable.
Lola, according to promotional materials, is set in a dusty “2002 Middle America” Anytown, one that’s littered with cigarette butts and empty newspaper boxes and whose teenagers stare aimlessly at the sky rather than at their phones. The film is more a scattering of snapshots from the titular character’s dysfunctional late-teen years than a straightforward story, but through these situations we learn a few things about Lola: she is kind, spaced-out and works two jobs to support her family; her mother, Mona (Virginia Madsen) is an addict whose religious fervor serves as the pretext for her abusive parenting; her younger brother, Arlo (Luke David Blumm), is a gentle-soul and — to the ire of their mother — gender-nonconforming; her mom’s boyfriend, Trick (Trevor Long), is a deadbeat piece of shit; and her two closest companions are her department store coworker, Babina (Raven Goodwin),7 and her on-and-off boyfriend and drug dealer, Malachi (Richie Merritt).
Lola showcases a number of scenarios that vary from tender and original to generic teen-trauma material. In particular, Arlo’s relationship with his mother produces the film’s most powerful scenes. Mona berates him and pulls his hair after finding out he’s been using the girl’s bathroom, and calls him a “f****t” when she sees him in the makeup Lola lovingly applied on his face. Eventually Lola and Arlo leave home to escape the abuse, moving in with Babina’s family, but Mona finds them. Upon return, we are greeted with a shot zoomed in on Arlo’s sneakers, as locks of hair drop near his feet on the bathroom floor. Mona is cutting his hair he purposefully grew long to express himself; he stares at a mirror in disbelief as his mother calmly delivers the film’s most chilling lines: “I love you so much, that’s why I’m doing this. I can’t have you going through life like this. You’re a good boy on the inside, and now we’re gonna make you look that way on the outside.” It’s an evil, transfixing scene, one where the writing, acting and cinematography all work in harmony to achieve the same depressing goal.
Unfortunately, outside of the Arlo-Mona conflicts, not enough of Lola’s chapters leave a solid impression. Though the camerawork is engaging (it consists mostly of shaky close-ups and static room shots that establish an unkempt mise-en-scène), the film is too often satisfied with having the camera set a listless mood rather than aid impactful scenes. In general, Lola relies too heavily on displaying flashy signifiers (cigarettes, crosses, makeup paraphernalia) at the expense of plotting around them. Toward the end of the film, Peltz Beckham uses voice-over narration to tell viewers about Lola’s future — the end result is something like a Tumblr-post PowerPoint presentation. Earlier, less-didactic scenes shot in the town strip club or the bathrooms in which the characters do drugs have been done a million times before. For a film so indebted to Euphoria, Lola could use a healthy dose of the show’s guns-a-blazing craziness; instead, it seems Peltz Beckham mostly copied its color palette. Or maybe the problem is deeper: maybe she just doesn’t know enough about this world to fully flesh it out?
Photo courtesy of Vertical
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