AFI FEST Los Angeles International Film Festival 2009

As impressive as director Javier Rebollo’s 2006 feature debut LOLA proved to be, it doesn’t prepare one for the sheer mastery on display in his second film. Rebollo, with his regular co-writer Lola Mayo, holds a bemused gaze on his favorite sort of character—the middle-class apartment dwellers of Madrid—but abandons the somewhat creepy world of peeping toms in LOLA for a splendidly comic, nocturnal urban adventure. The brilliant actress Carmen Machi—here a fresh incarnation of Fellini muse Giulietta Masina—slips into the role of a bored housewife with a startling blankness. Suddenly, though, night falls, and Machi’s persona alters, tarted up a bit, ready to bust out of the apartment and explore the streets. Anything might happen, and the film—winner of the San Sebastian festival’s Best Director Silver Shell award—holds the viewer in thrall by a chain of extraordinarily staged sequences fueled by a visual command and wit that honors the cinema of Jacques Tati, Otar Iosseliani and Fellini.

–Robert Koehler