This past week, Beckham’s serial socialite and actress Peltz embarked onto the director’s chair for the first time with the film ‘Lola’. The film is accompanied by numerous adjectives which don’t quite compliment it here including ‘predestined for mockery’. Despite being raised in a family of successful tycoons, Mrs. Peltz hasn’t quite captured and misplaced her efforts in an aesthetically unpleasing prize-fighting film about a Midwestern girl and aspiring stripper Leslie. There’s no rule saying that directors making movies in the genre of realism have to have a professional background in that sphere, however, both during and after the view of the entire screen, such disconnect becomes quite a disappointing factor!
According to both the ads and the viewers, Lola is about Lola, set in some boring midwestern town in 2002 filled with cigarette butts, empty booths of newspapers, and teenagers who have lost their senses, looking at the skies instead of at their phones. The narrative is more a set of moments taken from the ordinary sad teenage life of the title character, than a film with a beginning and an end, but through these situations, we learn a few things about Lola: she is sympathetically blank and hustles, working two shifts her mother, Mona (Virginia Madsen), is a drug addict and a religious lunatic with sadistic tendencies as a mother her younger brother, Arlo (Luke David Blumm), is sweet and a so-called gender trash militant, which is embarrassing to their mother; her former partner, Trick (Trevor Long), is a nidus of dumb shit and the other two main favorites of her are department store worker Babina (Raven Goodwin) and a drug addict Malachi (Richie Merritt) whom she has an on and off relationship with.
In the film, Lola recounts some experiences that range from the beautiful and unique to the banal common teen drama. Especially interesting is the fact that the strongest moments of this film are created by Arlo’s interactions with his mother. Mona finds out that he’s been using the girl’s bathroom, and starts pulling his hair, calling him “a f****t” after spotting him in the makeup that Lola had painted on him. Afterward, Arlo and Lola run away from home to get away from the abuse and live with Babina’s family, but voilà Upon returning home, we see a close-up shot of Arlo’s sneakers while hair strands fall on the bathroom floor around his feet. His mother Mona is chopping his hair. Long hair he initially grew for the purpose of self-expression. He looks at his reflection in disbelief, while his mother soundly announces, in a calm voice, one of the film’s highlights ‘I love you so much, this is why I do this. I can’t have you grow up like that. You are a good boy at heart and I am going to make you look like one.’ It is a very sick and disturbing scene and the writing, acting, and cinematography work very well, or rather, very badly together for that one achieved aim.
Regrettably, other than the conflicts between Arlo and Mona for the most part, there aren’t enough of Lola’s chapters that are worth remembering. The camerawork has good moments (including the constant use of shakily framed close-ups and room shots that don’t encompass the chaos in the mise-en-scene), but the majority of the time it feels like the film is content with the camera creating an atmosphere instead of the camera being used in action sequences. More generally, Lola also indulges in another vice putting too much dependence on glamorous props (cigarettes, crosses, and makeup) without plotting any around them. Towards the climax of the film, Peltz Beckham shifts her focus to the voice-over narration which portrays what the viewers are likely to see in the future of Lola all of this boils down to a rather bland, post-tumblr presentation slideshow. In advance, earlier, less-pedantic shots around the town strip club or the town’s drug-abusing toilets have been prevalent in many other films. Given how much this film is about Euphoria, one would say that Lola would benefit from their sheer madness but again, all Peltz Beckham seems to do is pick a color palette. Or perhaps the issue is more systemic maybe she is just not educated enough on the subject in question to expand it.
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