Romance Lives on in ‘Lola’

Jacques Demy’s 1961 “Lola,” running today through Wednesday at Laemmle’s Monica Showcase, was the 30-year-old director’s first film--and in some ways, he never let go of this movie or its characters. Anouk Aimee’s adorable dancer Lola returns in the 1969 “Model Shop” and her rejected young lover, Roland (Marc Michel), pops up in the 1964 “Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”

The original “Lola” is a buoyant romance with a cast full of ironically crisscrossing characters and there’s something charmingly incongruous about its technique and content. Demy’s script is fairy-tale musical-comedy stuff, with a bouncy Michel Legrand score, about old loves and the eternal recurrence of romance, yet “Lola” was shot with spectacularly airy and free monochrome wide-screen cinematography by young Raoul Coutard.

As much as anything else, “Lola” is a movie about being at loose ends in a city on sunny afternoons and pleasure-seeking evenings, and it’s also, unabashedly, a movie about other movies.

When Demy died of leukemia last year at 59, it’s possible that “Lola” remained his best-loved work; his last, “Three Tickets for the 26th,” with Yves Montand and another Legrand score, has yet to be released in America. It’s not true that his time ended after “Lola” or after his biggest success, “Cherbourg.” But, in 1961, it seemed, his time and timing were perfect.