Lola - Jacques Demy encore

Lola, a cabaret dancer in Nantes, France, still hopes that her great love Michel will return – he is the father of her young son and left for the US seven years earlier to make his fortune. Meanwhile, she has also bumped into Roland, someone she knew from the past. Roland, who is wasting his life away, is quite taken with Lola, but she cannot get Michel out of her head. And then there is the American sailor Frankie, who is also in love with Lola.

In this feature film debut, which he wrote himself, director Jacques Demy collaborated for the first time with composer Michel Legrand, even though he himself described the film as a “musical without music”. He dedicated this romantic drama to the German-French director Max Ophüls, who died in 1957. The film’s title – and thus also the name of the main character – refers to Josef von Sternberg’s classic Der Blaue Engel (1930), in which Marlene Dietrich plays the nightclub singer Lola Lola. In Demy’s film, Lola is played by Anouk Aimée.