MIFF Session #9: LOLA

Flashes of film running out of sprocket or brief broken images. A woman narrates a wish for someone to find the film she is recording. Credits and then we're in London during the blitz. Two posh young sisters operate an invention that can see into the future. It's like a huge bakelite console eith globe glowing at its centre. Through the misty noise of the screen we see David Bowie sining Space Oddity. The women put the machine (the Lola of the title) to use averting civilian deaths by leaking details if future air raids. They become known as The Angel of Portabello.

When the army catches up with them they share the technology for the war effort. All fine until someone puts out an eye ... or plays the phenomenon and subverts it like them dem Jerries. The war now looks lost. Instead of David Bowie there's now a soundalike who sings about marching and public executions. Twists of fate are dealt at dizzying speed. Is there a way out?

I was expecting and would have been happy with a Guy Maddin tribute. But this is something else, again. Andrew Legge (whose rap sheet I am now determined to investigate) has fashioned a kind of elevated hobbyist film with real acting, more than passable writing with some fine concepts. However arch some of the humour or goofy the concepts this is a serious period sci-fi whose tone lies somewhere between retro-found-footage and the kind of what if already established by Mollo and Browlow with their extraordinary It Happened Here. Oh, and there's lovely opportunity taken with the distressed old film stock look: the air invasion CGI looks as real as anything else on screen and ends up epic and terrifying.

If it gets loose in the second act when it should be tight and some stretches need trimming to avoid repetition of information, Lola yet makes it through as a diverting progression for a film maker who has struck his own invention of a retrograde cinema that has a genuine reason to exist. Guy Maddin is unassailable for camp loopiness that creates a parallel cosmos. Legge might well be ready to show us more earnest adventure. The world is still large enough for both.