Lolo (2015)
Directed by Julie Delpy

Film Review

After two amiable offbeat comedies in the Woody Allen mould - Two Days in Paris (2007) and Two Days in New York (2012) - actress-turned director Julie Delpy turns her back on Art House sophisticates and instead goes hell-for-leather after the mainstream French audience in her mostly overtly commercial film to date.  Lolo, Delpy's sixth and weakest film so far as a director, reuses several of the ideas of her earlier films but carelessly lobs these into the kind of vulgar high concept plot that has become de riguer in French comedy in recent years.  The film's premise - a fraught romance between a seemingly ill-matched couple is repeatedly sabotaged by the woman's psychopathically possessive son - is not what you would call sophisticated but Delpy could have made it work if she had pulled back on the cheap gags and put more effort into making the characters look like real human beings rather than silly cartoon characters auditioning for parts in the next St Trinian's movie.

The only thing that prevents Lolo from being an outright disaster are the admirable casting choices, which alone suggest that Delpy's judgement hasn't entirely deserted her.  Once again, Delpy casts herself in the lead role, playing the kind of Gallic Bridget Jones character that she has made her own, a middle-aged neurotic who is singularly ill-equipped to deal with the competing demands of love, career and motherhood.  Here Delpy is joined on screen by two actors who appeared in her earlier (and far superior) comedy Le Skylab (2011) - Vincent Lacoste and Karin Viard.  Lacoste is the son from Hell, a cross between the troublesome offspring in Étienne Chatiliez's Tanguy (2001) and Damien the Antichrist, a likeably evil brat with the mother of all Oedipus complexes who is prepared to go to any extremes (even fencing with an umbrella in his underpants) to ensure his mum remains single and unattached.  Delpy's supposed best friend, Viard is almost as grotesque - the archetypal liberated modern woman with a one-track brain and a sewer for a mouth.  With three such over-the-top clowns vying for our attention, the film badly needs at least one more down-to-earth character who can anchor it in something vaguely approximating to reality, and Dany Boon fulfils this role remarkably well in an unusually unshowy role - a welcome departure for a comic actor who is mostly associated with lowbrow comedies such as his box office hit Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008).

Lolo works desperately hard for is laughs but it bags surprisingly few, with most of the humour falling flat as the film repeatedly sinks to the level of a juvenile farce with a good taste bypass.  The intelligence, wit and observational flair of Delpy's previous Allenesque comedies are conspicuous by their absence and in their place we are presented with a vacuous entertainment that is too obviously custom-made for an undiscriminating French cinema audience, the kind that likes to have its gags excessively underlined in flashing red neon.  This is a shame because certain aspects of the film work surprisingly well - the Boon-Delpy pairing is an unexpected delight and leaves you longing for a rematch in a more sophisticated kind of rom-com that is more obviously Julie Delpy's forte.

Film Synopsis

Violette is a forty-something Parisian who leads a hectic but lonely life in the fashion business.  She is taking a thalassotherapy course at Biarritz with a friend when she meets Jean-René, a modest computer programmer who is getting over a recent divorce.  Jean-René makes an easy conquest of Violette, who is more than ready for romance after years of solitude, and soon joins her in the French capital.  It's an environment that the IT specialist has some difficulty adjusting to, although what is most likely to derail the budding romance is Violette's son Lolo, who has no intention of being ousted from his mother's affections by this unwelcome stranger...