LOL (Laughing Out Loud) (2009)

LOL arrives from 2008 France with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing for it. Lisa Azuelos directs a portrait of Parisian adolescence unfolding in comfortable apartments, high school corridors, and the sort of domestic squabbles that resolve themselves by the closing credits. Sophie Marceau, once the teenager of La Boum, now plays the mother, a piece of casting that carries more nostalgic weight than any thematic ambition the screenplay can muster. The film was a hit at home. It exists, it pleased people, and it moves on.

The canvas is uniformly white, uniformly middle-class, and uniformly heterosexual. Lola cycles through boyfriends the way teenagers do, and the film watches with a shrug. Nobody lectures us about representation, because nobody in this production appears to have considered it. There is a woman behind the camera and a mother-daughter friction at the center, which grants the proceedings a faint feminine pulse, though the film advances no argument on the subject and seems mildly embarrassed by the idea of having one. Money, race, sexuality, the body, the climate, the historical record: none of these intrude. The characters have nicer apartments than most viewers and never wonder why.

What keeps the whole enterprise watchable is its refusal to sermonize. The comedy observes. It does not instruct. When the class trip to England arrives, the film indulges every French cliché about damp streets and floral dresses and pasta served beside marmalade on the same plate, and it does so without a flicker of self-consciousness. That is either charming or provincial, depending on the viewer's patience. The result is a minor, genial artifact of a specific national cinema, pleasant enough, harmless, and entirely content to leave the culture wars for someone else.