Clubbed to Death (Lola) (1996)
Directed by Yolande Zauberman

Film Review

Clubbed to Death (Lola) is a spirited but not entirely successful attempt to combine the somewhat vacuous Cinéma du Look ascetic that emerged in French cinema in the early 1980s with the auteur realist approach that supplanted it in the 1990s.  The film was directed - with some flair, helped, apparently, by an intimate acquaintance with the contemporary club scene - by Yolande Zauberman, who first made a name for herself as a documentary filmmaker with Caste criminelle (1990).  Here, Zauberman's approach is more impressionistic than realist, so whilst her film, in narrative terms, feels pretty inconsequential, it does provide an astonishingly raw and vivid screen representation of the darker precincts of 1990s youth culture.

Filmed with a distinctive vitality in which the mood seesaws between exuberance and frenetic despair, Clubbed to Death (Lola) is ingrained with an unsettling trippy feel, a dreamlike quality that boldly evokes the experiences and emotions of the central protagonist - a superb Elodie Bouchez - as she goes on something of a hormonal overdrive, like a latter-day Alice in her newly discovered Wonderland.  The characterisation is virtually non-existent - the supporting characters played by Roschdy Zem and Béatrice Dalle are little more than empty ciphers - but this hardly matters and merely serves to underscore the stark pointlessness of the lives of the hapless individuals who get caught up in their unceasing punk orgy of sex and drugs.  The techno music that was carefully chosen by Zauberman adds greatly to the film's oppressive atmosphere and unflagging dynamism, with Rob D's Clubbed to Death providing the film with its grimly apt title.

Film Synopsis

Lola, a young woman in her early twenties, takes a daytrip to Paris from her home in the provinces but ends up missing the last bus home.  Feelings of anxiety and freedom begin to assert themselves as she begins to explore the unfamiliar district on the outskirts of the capital where she is now stranded until the morning.  She meets up with a young man who persuades her to accompany him to a nearby nightclub.  Lola finds herself transported into another world through an intoxicating cocktail of loud techno music and hard drugs.  It is in this state of happy delirium that she finds herself drawn to Emir, a young boxer of North African origin.  Little does she know that Emir already has a girlfriend, Saida, and she has absolutely no intention of surrendering him.  Before she knows it, Lola is drawn into an intense and potentially highly destructive love triangle with two people whose own lives are rapidly falling apart...