And Then Came Lola

And Then Came Lola encompasses pretty much everything that can bother me about the queer movie genre. And Then Came Lola is supposed to be the lesbian version of Run Lola Run, the intense, vaguely philosophical German film about a woman who races against the clock to deliver a great deal of money before her boyfriend desperately robs a supermarket. Unfortunately, adding a lesbian element to the story apparently meant taking out everything that was good about the original.

The plot of And Then Came Lola is changed from anything crime related to a lesbian racing against the clock to deliver some photos to her girlfriend who is, in Lola’s absence, being chatted up by her ex. Every element of the plot leads back the the characters all being lesbians. Everything is just too gay. (I can’t believe I just said that.)

But this is my problem with so many queer movies– they don’t get to be genre films. We don’t have a lot of queer action or thriller movies. What we get instead is endless films solely about homosexual relationships. I would have really liked And Then Came Lola to have some of the action the original ,heterosexual film had or the crime elements.

Instead, in turning the movie gay, the stakes become much smaller and the action nearly non-existent. Rather than people getting shot, banks getting held up and the lead character having some unexplained god-like power, we just got lesbians living their boring, regular lives where all of their activities tie back to their sexual preference.

The other thing about Lola that bugs me is that it’s a movie that exists in some sort of alternate universe where everyone is gay. Lola has a lot of street scenes and Lola interacting with numerous strangers… all of whom are gay women. Like seriously, all of them. Even the married woman is hitting on Lola. While I do totally get this over abundance of queer women as a method of compensating for the lack of queer women in basically every other movie, this is one where it’s gone too far. It ends up feeling like some weird sort of segregation that I find unhelpful for queer representation. I feel like it’s sort of saying the only way we can have queer characters is if everyone around them is also queer. They can’t be integrated with the heterosexuals.

Overall, And Then Came Lola is a blah film. I don’t care about any of the characters or their relationship problems. Lola as a character isn’t that interesting and her girlfriend really does seem to be more suited for her ex so I wasn’t really rooting for Lola to successfully show up on time thus salvaging their relationship.

On its own, And Then Came Lola is poor. Having seen the film it’s based on, it becomes infuriating. Any film that bases itself so heavily on an existent film is risky because it welcomes comparisons to the original. In this case, And Then Came Lola came up short time after time. There’s really no reason to watch this film instead of the original, no matter how much you like lesbians. The only thing decent about this film was the animation sequences. But again, Run Lola Run did them first and did them better.

Overall rating: 2.8/10