Lola
Andrew Legge’s splendidly imaginative sci-fi mockumentary plays with time in a truly adventurous way.
By chance Andrew Legge’s debut feature Lola was released in Britain in the same week that Martika Ramirez Escobar’s second full-length film Leonor Will Never Die reached us from the Philippines. Both works have at their heart an extraordinary concept that leaves realism far behind, but in each case despite the strong sense of originality one can point to antecedent movies that could be possible influences. Legge has already turned to sci-fi in a couple of his short films and in Lola, which he wrote with Angeli Macfarlane, he offers a story about two sisters, Thomasina and Martha Hanbury (Emma Appleton and Stefanie Martini) who in 1938 create a machine. They name it LOLA after their late mother and it proves capable of intercepting TV pictures from a later age, not just the images but the sound too, and this enables the sisters to look into the future.
What we see on the screen is described at the outset as consisting of film reels that were discovered in 2021 in the cellar of a house in Sussex. Consequently, Lola has been shot in black-and-white and made to look like footage dating from the period in which the story is set having supposedly been filmed by Martha herself. The notion that this is indeed footage which has survived the events seen in it links Lola with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Initially, however, only Martha's introductory description of the film being a warning concerned with how history can be made and unmade invites us to prepare for dark subject matter in due course. Initially LOLA’s glimpses of broadcasts still in the future are given a playful aspect as the girls respond to pop music unknown to them: they are awed by David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and are themselves driven to perform the 1964 song ‘You Really Got Me Going’ to a surprised and delighted gathering. However, even if the girls stay put in their own home, being able to see into the future in this way is akin to time travel and before long (it is now 1941) these broadcasts enable them to discover more about the war. In particular they start to learn of such matters as bombing attacks planned by the Germans before they have actually happened. When Sebastian Holloway (Rory Fleck Byrne), a lieutenant in military intelligence, comes to investigate he is persuaded of the genuine nature of what is revealed by LOLA and the authorities realise that they can take advantage of this advance information to forestall attacks. This is not Back to the Future, but it is a set-up in which without actual time travel involved it is indeed possible to change history.
As the story proceeds, we discover why the film was described at the outset as being a warning. Despite the good intentions in using LOLA to counter German strategy in the war, we see how such tactics can go wrong leading to unforeseen circumstances as history changes not for the better but for the worse (it can be assumed, I think, that It Happened Here, the 1963 film about an imagined conquest of Britain by the Nazis, was a further influence on Legge). As matters develop there is increasing tension between the sisters while the wider drama leads on to twists and turns in the narrative not easily foreseen.
If all this is quite as novel as Leonor Will Never Die, it is not that film but Lola which successfully turns its originality into a virtue. Legge’s film is engagingly unorthodox and spins its yarn ably aided by its competent cast and by the lack of flab in the movie (it runs for less than 90 minutes and it moves well too, both factors being highly beneficial). As a reimagining of history incorporating such figures as Hitler, Churchill and Oswald Mosley, Lola is certainly entertaining. One aspect of it, however, is in a league of its own and that is the extreme care taken to make the film appear what it pretends to be – credit here to Legge, to his production designer Ferdia Murphy and not least to his photographer, Oona Menges who, as the daughter of Chris Menges, is carrying on what could be considered a great family tradition.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Emma Appleton, Stefanie Martini, Rory Fleck Byrne, Aaron Monaghan, Hugh O’Conor, Philip Condron, Ayvianna Snow, Shaun Boylan, William Forrest, Serena Brabazon.
Dir Andrew Legge, Pro Alan Maher and John Wallace, Screenplay Andrew Legge and Angeli Macfarlane, Ph Oona Menges, Pro Des Ferdia Murphy, Ed Colin Campbell, Music Neil Hannon, Costumes Lara Campbell.
Cowtown Pictures/Head Gear Films/Bankside Films/Screen Ireland/Metrol Technology-Signature Entertainment.
79 mins. Ireland/UK. 2022. UK Rel: 7 April 2023. Cert. 15.
