Lolo (2015)

(On Cable TV, November 2021) As a fluently bilingual Francophone, I have a privileged perch from which to consider Julie Delpy’s career — not only from the American side, but also the French one. Lolo, for instance, has Delpy as writer-director-star, and goes straight for high-concept comedy rather than the more subtle material elsewhere in her filmography. Featuring leading French comedian Danny Boon as a divorced man who meets and romances a divorced woman (Delpy), this film soon takes a dark turn when her possessive adult son does his best to sabotage their relationship. Anyone familiar with Boon’s other films could be forgiven for thinking that he wrote or directed it, so closely does it follow several of his other films. But what sets Lolo apart from many other comedies is how deeply it becomes stuck in the son’s dangerous possessiveness, and how it can’t get out of the pit it digs for itself — by the time the young man is revealed to be an utter psychopath, there’s no definitive ending, no way out of this bad situation… and the comedy of the film is seriously threatened. It doesn’t help that Lolo goes for maximum humiliation comedy whenever it can, scarcely leaving any dignity to Boon’s character as he’s manipulated into increasingly more embarrassing (eventually dangerous and criminal) behaviour. It does suggest a fundamental problem at the film’s core — a lack of understanding of how far you can go with comedy and still have it remain a comedy. Directorially, the film is fine without being remarkable — the tone is a lot of mainstream comedy without much in terms of impact. In other words, Lolo works but not completely, and it has enough weak moments and bone-headed decisions to confound. I do like Delpy a lot as a performer (and this is one area in this film where her work is irreproachable), but as a writer-director, Lolo doesn’t strike me as particularly successful.