Trans actor Mya Bollaers brings a personal stillness and confidence to this flawed road movie from Belgian film-maker Laurent Micheli. Bollaers works well with co-star Benoît Magimel and together they do their best to raise the standard of this well-meaning but basically unsatisfying work.
Bollaers plays Lola, a young trans woman who has been thrown out of the family home by angry father Philippe (Magimel) and is now living in foster-care accommodation while preparing for gender reassignment surgery. But Lola’s mother, who had always accepted her identity, has died and now a somewhat contrived series of events means that Philippe and Lola must take a car journey up to her childhood home by the sea to scatter the ashes – that time-honoured trope. Philippe is bad-tempered and transphobic, he misgenders Lola and uses her old name, Lionel. But there are no prizes for guessing whether they gradually come to terms with each other.
There are quite a few cliches here: at one moment, Lola actually puts her hand and head out of the car from the passenger seat as it drives along, luxuriating in the rush of air and freedom in the manner of TV ads. She even steals something from a petrol station convenience store and is made to pay for it by Philippe – a narrative touch weirdly similar to the sugary Oscar-winning road movie The Green Book.
There are some laborious flashbacks showing Lola’s unhappy memories of childhood seaside holidays and Philippe’s car itself plays a strange role: it bursts into flames unattended at one stage for reasons that are not made entirely clear, apart from that it brings some bigoted cops into the picture, from whose ugly abuse Philippe protects Lola.
This is a film that never quite diverts from route one: but Bollaers and Magimel show their talent.
• Lola and the Sea is released on 17 December in cinemas.
