One Paragraph Movie Review: Lola

Three hundred and thirtieth film: Lola, a French romantic comedy from 1961 that bases itself around an unrequited love story, a series of overlapping coincidences, and Anouk Aimee’s collarbones. Lola is a cabaret dancer and single mother who runs into her aimless childhood friend Roland, who has had a crush on her for a decade. He pines and tries to find himself while she zigzags between waiting for the father of her child and one true love to return and sleeping with an American sailor who reminds her of him. Light on story but heavy on style and corsets, I feel like I’ve been marinating in France for an hour and a half before being sauteed only lightly in plot. A pleasant enough way to spend time, but the smell of cigarettes is stronger than my interest. The fact that at least forty minutes was spent on Lola moaning about how many men love her but we got less than five minutes of a robustly more interesting diamond smuggling sub-plot was tres disappointing. Fine. Two-ish questionable teenage visits to the local carnival out of five.