Writer/director Matthew Ross originally wrote the script nearly a decade before the film was shot. As we do, we start unravelling the chest-thumping masculinity which drives Frank in how he responds to Lolas revelations of abuse. Running time: 88 mins. Desperate to convince Hazel, she agrees to work as a temporary jillaroo (ranch hand) under Max at the farm, to prove her mettle. But when he musters the courage and reveals his true identity to her the next morning, she is dismayed at his lies. Where the somewhat fragmented aspects of the plot would normally make things frustrating, here they make things all the more interesting in the way they symbolize the unpredictability and fragile state of Frank and Lolas relationship. Matthew Ross's Frank & Lola is about an adult male grappling with the mind-blowing revelation that his girlfriend had a sexual life before him. Cinemark Initially I was hesitant. From Austin Butler and Cate Blanchett to a potential Best Supporting Actress toss-up, see who EW thinks will win at the 2023 Oscars. Entertainment Weekly is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation All Rights Reserved. Below are steps you can take in order to whitelist Observer.com on your browser: Click the AdBlock button on your browser and select Don't run on pages on this domain. "[20], At JoBlo.com, Chris Bumbray gave Frank & Lola and 8/10 rating, writing that Even if their relationship is toxic, for some strange reason you want them patch things up and live happily ever after. The Latest Podcast #116: Films of Steven Soderbergh, Magic Mikes Last Dance, Horrific Inquiry: MY BLOODY VALENTINE (2009), THE LAST OF US Season 1 Episodes 2-5: Whoa, Were Halfway There, LITTLE DIXIE: Little Gas In Grillo Grit-Pic, YOUR PLACE OR MINE: A Generic Comedy That Promises More Than It Delivers, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT And NARVIK: Germany And Norway Made Very Different Films About War And Trauma, STOLEN YOUTH: INSIDE THE CULT AT SARAH LAWRENCE: A Nightmarish Documentary Of Pain, Trauma And Hope, The Everlasting Beauty Of CHUNGKING EXPRESS, OFF THE RAILS: A Moving Ride On the Tracks Of A Troubled Life. Upon returning from the camping trip after arguing with Max, Lola sees Calder and Audra at Hazels doorstep. Berlinale 2023 Highlights, Part Two: Reality, Manodrome, The Adults, Inside, Golda, Angela Bassett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brendan Fraser, Cate Blanchett, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson Feted at SBIFF 2023, Revisiting Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Tragically Common: Jamie Dack, Lily McInerny and Jonathan Tucker on Palm Trees and Power Lines. So does Lola finally manage to win the contract as well as his heart? Copyright 2023 Meredith Corporation. A snippet of conversation. He carries the same sort of intensity into his moves in the kitchen, where you can feel the mans devotion to his craft as though he were a musician working with his instrument. One of the immediately noticeable aspects of Frank & Lola is its noir feel. Thus, Hazel advises Max to tell Lola about his true identity, but he refuses to do so out of fear. Some may say otherwise, but theres hardly a more attractive and effective poster for any movie being released this year than the one for Frank & Lola, the new noir-soaked romance starring Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots. , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes. The alleged tension mounts with a series of ridiculous and totally implausible plot twists that end up back in Vegas where Alan arrives mysteriously, lusting for Lola. Catch Me If You Can Plot Synopsis. Lola flirts with strangers in bars, she refuses to commit, you just cant trust Lola, who is a chip off the block following in the platform-heel footsteps of her oversexed mother (Rosanna Arquette in a role so minor that it consists of only one scene). But we're still left with the nagging feeling that debut writer/director Matthew Ross and his cast never quite got a handle on what draws these two to each other, what would make Lola disclose that devastating story to Frank after years of telling no one (including family), and what demons would compel Frank to fly across the Atlantic and come on like Charles Bronson in khakis. Poots is similarly good It's a sexy, adult thriller that doesn't pander and never feels artificial. Featuring shades of Bret Easton Ellis, Charles Bukowski, and Raymond Carver, Frank & Lola proves an enthralling and intoxicating love story from its upfront beginning to and ending which proves a mix of melancholy and hope. Cracks begin to show after Lola suddenly cheats on Frank, which leads to Frank's evolving mistrust of Lola and a growing obsession with an imposing man . Lola bails him out of jail the next morning and confides in him that her mother Patricia's previous boyfriend Alan Larsson, a Swedish millionaire, had raped her the previous summer. Plot twists pile up, and a light-footed, psycho-sexual character study becomes something like a film noir revenge thriller. Yes. He puts a letter through Alan's door pretending to be Lola and asking him to meet her in the hotel's closed restaurant, which is actually Frank's new restaurant. And Ross has a great sense of how to build a scene and let actors carry it, while still paying attention to light and space and never allowing the camera to become a mere recording device. Romance, . This leads to Frank and his eventual understanding of Lolas tragedy as hers, not his to appropriate. And its almost enough to make it work. This is obviously a modestly-budgeted film, but production designer Gerald Sullivan and cinematographer Eric Koretz have collaborated to give it a glossily seedy look, while editors Rebecca Rodriguez and Jennifer Lilly maintain a deliberate pace without sacrificing tension and Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans have confected a properly unsettling score. Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications. Frank Jr., 16, had been spending a fun-filled week with his friend Jim Saffie, whose . Frank and Lola may not have the complexity of plot and sense of inevitable doom that marked much of the work of a noir master like Jim Thompson, but it offers the same sort of bleak character study that he specialized in. Updated December 07, 2016 at 10:07 PM EST, ALL CROPS: FRANK & LOLA, from left: Michael Shannon, Imogen Poots, 2016. ph: Eric Koretz / © Paladin / Courtesy Everett Collection. Lola tells Frank that the wealthy woman who picked him up in the club was in reality Alan's wife Claire, and that Alan brings her men to sleep with in exchange for her allowing him to do whatever he wants. graduate with a concentration in pre-19th. Ross isnt examining the ugliness of male possessiveness, but reveling in it. As detailed in Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca spent much of the day of Saturday, August 9, 1969, with Rosemary's children, Suzan and Frank Struthers Jr., at Lake Isabella, a popular resort area 150 miles from Los Angeles. Our team. The love story between the two main characters drives so much of the films intentions, as they work to stay together even after so much hurt. He also states he has no interest in joining the family business and requests his sister to keep the truth to herself. It is this back and forth of never really being able to leave the other person no matter what is said and done for they got a concur on you. Cracks begin to show after Lola suddenly cheats on Frank, which leads to Frank's evolving mistrust of Lola and a growing obsession with an imposing man from her past. Just what well-nigh the head? [4] In February 2015, Arclight Films announced that it had acquired all international sales rights for the film. In the end, Ross leaves us with an ambiguitywhich pervades the last shot dominated by a simple reflection in a mirror and he never leads us one way or another to any answers. Theyre characters who exist only in cinema, working glamorous jobs that require them to occupy atmospheric sets in repose, looking commanding and sexy. She explains that Alan did in fact rape her while she was studying fashion in Paris, but that she had fallen in love with him due to Stockholm syndrome. Frank realizes she's a girl in danger of causing him constant misery, especially when she rarely comes home at night on time, and sometimes not at all. Hes a classic film-noir sap like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. His suspicions grow darker when Keith finds a position for Lola at a posh boutique. When Frank discovers a one-night stand Lola had in a hotel with an unknown man from out of town, he storms out feeling angry and betrayed. As a result, the film exists as an unwavering character piece about a pair of lovers whose complex relationship with love will almost certainly be their undoing. Frank is a talented and driven chef working in Las Vegas whose life is thrown into a tailspin after he meets and falls passionately in love with Lola, an aspiring fashion designer. From a distance, theirs seems like a relationship that might have another six months left in it, the kind of brief but intense extended affair that they'll both fantasize about occasionally, years or even decades later, but without spending too much time wondering what might have been because they already know the answer. Frank plays to all of Shannons strengths as an actor, especially when he has to keep his character a rage-filled, yet contained figure, while Poots proves herself the appropriate well that Lola needs to be in order to register as a complex woman she is. With Poots, however, she continues to show that when you lot retrieve of actresses who are hired because they can perform, the ones who volition make yall feel something, her name deserves to exist on that list. This movie casts a troubling spell.[16], In Consequence of Sound, Michael Roffman wrote: Part drama, part psychosexual thriller, part revenge fantasy, Michael Shannon's latest platform balls up the dark mystery of Polanski, the vivid passion of De Palma, and the razor tension of Hitchcock for a savvy and meticulous 90 minsFrank & Lola is an electric modern noir that thrives from indelible characters and a palatable style. The movie follows two drastically different narratives. A love-sick guy who allows himself to fall for the wrong girl and then gets led down a morally rocky path toward oblivion. As just noted, the master issue is in that location isnt a class A performance from this moving picture. Suffice it to say that Frank and Lola is a picture that casts a moody spell as it wends its way through plot convolutions that depend as much on atmosphere as surprise. There's something missing here, something big, something that would have tied up all the film's finer qualities into a coherent whole. Your email address will not be published. Summary: Lola receives a phone call from Manni asking for her help to replace 100,000 Marks that he has misplaced on the subway. RELATED: How To Get Away With Murder: The 10 Worst Things Annalise Ever Did. Danny Bensi and Saunder Juuriaans composed the film's score. A former film journalist, Ross made a number of acclaimed shorts including Lola and Inspired by Bret Easton Ellis, but makes a striking debut with this feature.[22] Additionally, The Film Stage named Frank & Lola as one of 15 best films of the festival,[23] and Ioncinema included Ross on its list "Top 10 New Voices" at Sundance 2016. To view the purposes they believe they have legitimate interest for, or to object to this data processing use the vendor list link below. Frank goes to Paris, ostensibly to look into a potentially lucrative chef job set up by Lola's mother (Rosanna Arquette, overdoing the shallow self-regard and sexual voraciousness; when she tells Frank, "I can't wait to taste your food," I expected her to add a cartoon-y meow). Frank ( Michael Shannon) and Lola (Imogen Poots) are fumbling around the fringes of a relationship, two self-diagnosed fuck-ups who wrestle with the fear that they're wounds run too deep to be. He cooks for her and while they say the quickest way to a human beings heart is through his breadbasket, the same seems to apply to women too. Then, theres no turning back. And Poots, who seems one film away from becoming a huge movie star, is terrifically unpredictablevulnerable one minute and manipulative the next. Copyright Fandango. Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller. This is nuts considering how crazy they both are, but Ross makes it workOne thing that's significant about Frank & Lola is that it's a legitimately serious film about sex, something that's increasingly rare these daysRoss has a really sharp eye, with it having a rich, sophisticated look that gives the film studio-level production values. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more. By this time, Frank is so schizophrenic he no longer knows truth from fantasy. [6] Frank & Lola was one of two completed featured films selected out the Lab's eight total projects. Frank is a brooding Las Vegas chef who has always focused his energy into his culinary talents, until he meets Lola, a young and beautiful enigma. Alan then shows Frank a sex tape with Lola and another woman, that shows Lola taking sexual orders from Alan. And if I'd made it earlier, it wouldn't have been as tight as it was when we shot it. With Frank & Lola now in select theaters and available on Digital HD and On Demand, I recently had the pleasure of hopping on the phone with Michael Shannon to talk about his part in the movie . Lola Alvarez is a talented sommelier who works as a wine executive for Mythos, a wine importing company. But the reflection says it all, as the film is, ultimately, about Lola. Thus, Lola decides to take matters into her own hands and flies to Waratah Station, Hazels family sheep farm in Australia where she is holidaying. Offers may be subject to change without notice. So when Lolas past comes back to haunt her, so comes the question if Frank is willing to piece of work with Lola or if her issues are too much for what he makes out to be a lonely but uncomplicated life. Frank is a chef hoping to reclaim lost potential and open up his own restaurant in Las Vegas, while Lola is an aspiring fashion designer who has just been offered a job opportunity most would kill for. When the pair returns from their camping trip, Lola immediately decides to return to Los Angeles and starts packing her bags. Unavailable on an ad-supported plan due to licensing restrictions. Frank then tracks Alan down again while he is in Las Vegas, hoping to have another encounter with Lola. Claire offered her a $400,000 check if Lola were to get an abortion and leave Paris, which she reluctantly agreed to, and moved to Las Vegas, where she then met Frank. Frank is a talented French chef and Lola is just starting her career as a fashion designer. A class a performance from this moving picture joining the family business and requests his sister to keep truth... Annalise Ever Did Audra at Hazels doorstep while he is in Las Vegas, hoping to another. 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