'Lola Versus' review: "Aimless in direction and pointless in conception"

Desperately straining to strike a balance between emotional resonance and throwaway gags, Lola Versus fails on every level with the exception of promoting Greta Gerwig's star potential. Such is the exaltation that arrives when the end credits mercifully roll, it's borderline impossible to stifle a cry of "thank f**k"! Such is the agony of the preceding 80-something minutes…

The titular Lola (Gerwig) is a woman approaching 30 whose life is thrown into turmoil when her fiancée ditches her a few weeks before the wedding. She then spends the rest of the movie canoodling with her former partner's best mate, sleeping with a rollerblading oddball she meets at a fish counter, receiving advice from her contrived oddball parents (a wasted Bill Pullman and Debra Winger) and moping around bemoaning her existence in front of her nauseating pals.

So why should we care about Lola's spiritual adventure as she embarks on a journey to rediscover herself in New York? An answer is not forthcoming. Despite Gerwig trying her best to elicit empathy for the character, Lola comes across a selfish, solipsistic bint. She's simply not interesting enough to take an interest in, with her actions - especially those concerning the back-and-forth relations with her ex fiancée - being tantamount to a dog chasing its own tail in a perpetual loop.

"I haven't changed my underwear in three days," a sweaty Lola informs her mother while on a treadmill. The script is swamped with lines like this, which seek to endear the character to the viewer but are so forced that they have the opposite effect. Lola's deadpan best mate Alice (Zoe Lister-Jones) also rattles off various matter-of-fact comments in a futile bid to raise laughs, such as her opening gambit of "I've got to wash my vagina". It's just randomly blurted out mid-conversation. Perhaps the filmmakers should have put a laughter track on the movie to at least obscure the audible groans from any forlorn soul subject to Lola Versus?

At least there's uniformity between the style and subject matter, as the movie's tone is all over the place just like Lola's head. There are frequent scenes of self-conscious whimsy (as denoted by the annoying soundtrack) juxtaposed with sequences of an incredulous nature.

This structural daftness is epitomised by Lola's copulation with the caricature oddball fish-counter guy being written purely for laughs with no semblance of realism, as he explains his large, erm, appendage is a result of being an incubator baby. Then, in the very next scene, Lola is reduced to tears as her other lover (her fiancée's pal) discovers that she has had sex with the fishy man. But how can we care about Lola's breakdown when the set-up was so artificial that it negated any sense of connection with the character?

Aimless in direction and pointless in conception, Lola Versus invokes nausea through its dire execution and pretences of emotional resonance. For a tale of love and loss involving conflicted young folks, check out the infinitely superior Like Crazy.