Julie Delpy’s natural qualities as a performer have been evident since she was first cast by Godard at the age of fourteen, but her uneven directorial output continues with Lolo, a strange and sometimes off-putting romantic comedy. Even while she gives a winning performance as Violette, another stylish Parisian who feels unstylish, her character remains mostly passive while her monstrous son Lolo (Vincent Lacoste) drives the plot. The result has many funny moments, but they’re counteracted by insufferably broad and cartoonish plot elements.
While vacationing with friends in Biarritz, Violette meets Jean-Renè (Danny Boon), a software developer. Working in the fashion industry and raising a son by herself, Violette has had bad luck in love for years and, even if Jean-Renè is laughably provincial to their jaded eyes, her friends push her to have a fling. They do, which Violette enjoys more than she thought she could, and as luck would have it, Jean-Renè is moving to Paris. Back on her home turf, she and Jean-Renè date, but he discovers that the “little boy” she discusses breathlessly is actually almost 20. Lolo is a coddled artist with some serious Oedipal issues, who is all smiles outwardly to Jean-Renè, but secretly plots to sabotage the new relationship and keep Violette all to himself.
At first, the conflict seems to be whether Jean-Renè is too provincial and uncool to keep up with fashionista Violette and some of the funnier moments involve Violette and her friends dishing on Jean-Renè and others with distinctly French sexual candor. But this theme, which conceivably could lead to both comedy and introspection on Violette’s part, mostly is thrown out the window when Lolo and his schemes are introduced. At one point when he is supposedly moving out to give the new couple space, he quips that they aren’t going to do the blended families thing like an American sitcom. But the antics he practices instead aren’t just sub-sitcom in thought and execution, they’re like ideas rejected from “Dennis the Menace” cartoons decades ago. Among the plots: itching powder, drugging Jean-Renè at a fashion party, sabotaging his wardrobe, somehow inducing two girlfriends to sleep in Jean-Renè’s bed to be discovered by Violette, and planting an improbably sophisticated virus on Jean-Renè’s computer the day before a career-defining meeting at a large bank. Lolo is clearly meant to be found funny, but with little explication given other than an out of place impressionistic shot of his yearning to return to his mother’s breasts, his actions come across more as disturbed and deeply unpleasant. Violette is mostly sympathetic as a mother who loves her son unconditionally, but once it’s revealed that Lolo has been pulling these seriously harmful stunts for years, her behavior seems more like deluded enabling.
When Lolo himself is off the screen, the film mostly works, with a strong supporting cast and Delpy and Boon displaying chemistry with enough differences in personality to make it interesting. But no amount of wit on the part of the others can make up for the conceptual failure of putting creepy Lolo front and center, neglecting all of the interesting elements of this struggle for affection and focusing instead on inane pranks.
