Since the original camera negative of Lola was destroyed in a fire, in 2000 a new internegative was made with the help of Archives Françaises du Film based on a copy found at the British Film Institute. The creation of the new internegative was supervised by Agnès Varda, aided by Raoul Coutard, the director of photogra­phy of Lola, for the exposure of the film. In 2012 Ciné Tamaris, Fondation Tech­nicolor pour le Patrimoine du Cinéma, and Fondation Groupama Gan pour le Cinéma made a complete restoration of the film. Lola has returned to its original splendor thanks to the digital restoration of both image and sound. In a film that takes place over a period of just three days, developing the characters seems impossible if the director refuses the convenience of flashbacks or long, biographical explanations. Demy resolved this problem – and with such elegance! – by offering a plural, fragmented vision, a portrait from many different perspectives. Frankie, for example, is Michel’s double – Michel as he was 8 years earlier, when he first met Lola at a party. And Lola herself is depicted as a mirror with three faces: on one side there’s Cécile – herself at fourteen with her adolescent dreams, her passion for dance, and her escapes to the fairgrounds; on the other there is Madame Desnoyers, ex-dancer, victim of her gam­bling husband who left her penniless and with a son […], full of regrets for what she was not able to achieve, incapable of ac­cepting her own solitude and the desertion of her loved ones. At the center stands Lola – Lola to Richard, but Cécile to Mi­chel – triumphant and fragile, full of faith in a future that, unbeknownst to her, will overwhelm her […]. This game of mirrors underlying the film generates a series of fascinating double perspectives that Demy takes advantage of every chance he gets: events and senti­ments reproduce themselves in a closed­in universe whose fundamental law seems to be repetition. […] It is where situations repeat themselves, but also a magical space where it appears everyone is invited to a mysterious appointment: when, in one of the first shots, Michel arrives in Nantes, Lola has just been there three days, Frankie is just passing by with his boat, and Roland decides to leave. This world, in which everyone runs into one another, seems to be driven by a giant whirlwind that pushes the characters out of this vortex so that they can begin living out their own destinies. […] But the fate that has brought them together for only a few hours ends up multiplying the improbable encounters, forcing them to dance the dances of missed opportunities, missed collisions. Nantes becomes the forest in A Mid-Summer’s Dream where everyone chases after everyone else, where couples break up and come back together. […] This tangle of wanderers gets translated by the long camera movements, the impor­tance of the city – its streets where people sometimes walk right by each other with­out noticing. It is there where Fate awaits at a bend in the road, from above on a set of stairs. Interior shots are rare and fleet­ing, and get dragged along by the frenetic desire to being immersed again in the per­petual motion that animates the world.

Jean-Pierre Berthomé, Jacques Demy et les racines du rêve, L’Atalante, Nantes 1982