Comics in Film: Lola (1961), directed by Jacques Demy.
French schoolgirl Cecile and American sailor Frankie discuss the idea of a “mysterious planet” from Meteor, a monthly science fiction comics magazine that features the long-running bande dessinée “Les Conquérants de l'Espace” by cartoonist Raoul Giordan and writer Robert Lortac. In this scene, Cecile has been sent to get a few groceries by her mother with the incentive of also picking up the latest issue of her favourite comic. Frankie has bought the last copy, but charitably gives it to her, and the two form a brief friendship. Cecile is on the cusp of her 14th birthday and has a teenage crush on Frankie, on leave from his U.S. Navy ship but almost finished his tour of duty and on the verge of returning to his exotic far-away home of Chicago, Illinois. Set in the port city of Nantes, Lola is a beautiful film about arrested adolescence and liminality, with people always on the threshold of departure and change, all wrapped up in myths of romance, escape, travel, coincidence, circularity, movement, ritual, repetition, nostalgia, impermanence, death, rebirth, transformative space, and reinvention.
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