Writer-director-star Julie Delpy’s sixth feature, “Lolo,” is a lightly likable, largely lowbrow slapstick comedy with dashes of eye-widening Oedipal terror, observing Violette, a hardworking single mother of forty (Delpy) who starts a new affair with a nice-guy “hick,” Jean-Rene (Dany Boon) while on a Biarritz spa vacation, before the hell-bent complication of her spoiled teenage son, Lolo (Vincent Lacoste) raises its curly head. There’s always a streak of potential malice and havoc in Delpy’s directorial output (“Two Days in Paris,” “Two Days In New York”) and certainly in her performances (especially the lovely outbursts of “Before Midnight”), and she offers full and troubling rein with the complications of her light-to-dark comedy, with a son who can turn from sunshine to sonofabitch on a centime. Best of all may be the sexually steeped badinage Violette and Ariane (Karin Viard) share: this is good, dirty stuff. 100m. (Ray Pride)
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
