At first I felt sympathy for heartbroken 29-year-old Lola (Greta Gerwig), whose longtime boyfriend Luke (Joel Kinnaman) breaks up with her just weeks before their wedding. But soon in this often irritatingly trite comedy, Lola reveals herself to be one of the self-obsessed, self-pitying young women who often give the Facebook generation a bad reputation.
Lola turns to her best friend Henry (Hamish Linklater), first for comfort, then as a rebound fling. She’s not sure about this new development though, and hooks up with a weirdo architect who picks her up at a fish market. This fractures her relationship with Henry and further separates her from Luke, who for no particular reason decides to try to win her back.
Woe is her, I guess. How’s a girl supposed to juggle all these unfulfilling romantic entanglements? Especially when she’s in the middle of preparing her Ph.D. dissertation on French literature, which is about our modern culture’s inability to deal with silence. In other words, she’s writing about how we don’t know how to just shut up and be alone anymore (“please note the irony,” the movie telegraphs to us). What lesson do you suppose she’ll learn by the end?
Lola Versus is full of contrived, cutesy little moments seemingly meant to endear Lola and her friends to us but which are grating in their phoniness. Look: there’s Henry and Lola on their first outing as a romantic couple, trekking to stand in front of Neil Sedaka’s house for no particular reason! How cooky! And there’s Lola breaking up with the weirdo architect by reciting lines from The Godfather. How wacky is that?! And there’s Lola’s pointlessly crass friend Alice (Zoe Lister Jones), who’s always spouting outrageous non sequiturs, like when she announces that she’s leaving the room to go wash her vagina! Where do they come up with this stuff?!
Seriously, where do they come up with this stuff? Because I would like that operation shut down immediately.
