LOLA, reviewed

In England, in the 1940s, reclusive scientist sisters Martha and Thomasina create a revolutionary contraption they call LOLA.

Their machine can tune in to TV and radio signals from the future. The images on LOLA’s cathode-ray tube screen are a portal to the future of music and culture for the sisters, transporting their minds far from a raging global conflict and the dilapidated country house they call home.

Martha (Stefanie Martini) and Thomasina (Emma Appleton) are enchanted by the music of David Bowie, Bob Dylan and The Kinks, going so far as adopting “Thom” and “Mars” as nicknames based on Bowie’s lyrics.

The sisters live with one foot planted firmly in the future. They fashion their own makeshift synthesisers, booze away their evenings, and party like it’s 1969.

Martha chronicles their exploits through point-of-view filmed diary entries. In the film’s early stages the girls have a good time all the time. Martha’s film plays like an Instagram highlights reel of a weekend you’d want to forget.

But the spectre of future events hovers beyond the frame and the knowledge that the world is at war is never too far from the narrative.

In the here and now, LOLA helps with the war effort as the sisters act as an early warning signal for German bombing runs. Through mysterious pirate broadcasts, the sisters draw the admiration and the attention of the army. Soon, LOLA is playing a pivotal role in Britain’s fight against the Germans.

LOLA is a reworking of director Andrew Legge’s earlier short The Chronoscope. That film had, by comparison, a more straightforward approach to storytelling.

Where The Chronoscope presents as a documentary complete with talking heads and archival footage, LOLA plays like Zelig by way of Jonas Mekas – intimate and immediate in its painstakingly analogue presentation.

Great efforts have been made to make LOLA look authentic. Filmed using period-appropriate cameras and lenses and techniques, there’s a heavy emphasis on the retro in this narrative of retro-futurism.

Stefanie Martini operates the camera for much of the film as Martha shoots the action around her. In later sequences she edits reels together using the same techniques as used in the film that the audience is watching in the cinema.

The hands-on approach to the filmmaking within the film, and the filmmaking itself, makes LOLA the machine a convincing piece of technology. It looks at one with the crumbling Grey Gardens-esque interior.

You can see this hodgepodge of tubes and dials and wires as something tangible, and as such, the science fiction here feels speculative, soft but believable.

Martha’s unsteady, roving camerawork conveys an excitability that her sister lacks.

Thomasina has her mind on more serious matters. She pays little attention to Sebastian (Rory Fleck Byrne), a soldier stationed to watch the sisters at work. But Martha’s camera gives away her growing feelings for him with little glances caught on the film strips.

Martini and Appleton give standout performances as the closer-than-close sisters. Their hip, out-of-time sensibility plays well against the familiar bombed-out backdrop of a war film.

Thomasina and LOLA become the backbone of Britain’s wartime intelligence-gathering. Martha jokes that her sister is “Major Thom” now. But the stakes are higher than ever before, despite the camerawork operating in the same whimsical manner.

Martha catches the asides and incidental details with her camera. Thomasina moving military models around a map absentmindedly, days-old bottles of wine and half-eaten rations in the background of scenes, and then, a simple mistake changes history as we, and they, know it to be.

Ah, cause and effect, the time-traveller’s burden. The tide of war eventually shifts in Germany’s favour, all appears lost, David Bowie is replaced by a fascistic rock star, Reginald Watson (Shaun Boylan).

It’s at this point that LOLA starts to falter as the scale expands too fast, too soon.

In an earlier sequence, the sisters play a swing-y version of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”. The song becomes a wartime anthem and we see it sweeping Britain and the wider world as a song of defiance and victory.

It’s a fun scene but it moves away from the handheld style that’s defined the look of the film up to that point. It feels jarring and beyond the scope of the narrative as it’s been presented thus far.

Similarly, Boylan as the could-be fascist Bowie overreaches. We needn’t look to science fiction to see the real Bowie flirt with fascist iconography.

As the narrative expands beyond the house and the sisters, the need for more elaborate filmmaking techniques emerges. The rotoscoping that inserts Adolf Hitler into scenes with Thomasina and LOLA is convincing, but again, it takes us away from that thrilling immediacy. It’s easy to lose sight of the narrative with all this zooming out.

LOLA is at its best as a low-level, high-concept picture. Legge’s commitment to the lived-in look and feel of the film is extraordinary. It’s only when modern movie magic enters the frame that the film’s bewitching spell begins to wear off.