Teenager Lola (Christa Theret), known as LOL to her friends, lives in Paris with her divorced mother Anne (Sophie Marceau), with whom she constantly fights, and two younger siblings. She is taking her first tenacious steps into young love by dating classmate Arthur (Felix Moati), but this falters when he tells her he cheated on her over summer with one of her close friends. LOL decides to cut him off and retaliate with one of his mates Mael (Jeremy Kapone), an aspiring rocker with parental issues of his own. Her other friends get quite a kick out of complicating things further meanwhile, and after a school trip to England her home life spirals even more out of control when her mum starts two-timing with her boyfriend and her ex-husband, the kids' father Alaine (Alexander Aster).
On paper, LOL (Laughing Out Loud) may seem a pretty stock teen comedy in the vein of John Hughes or Amy Heckerling, but co-writer/director Lisa Azuelos makes it feel fresh and entertaining by consciously casting her own Eurocentric eye over these familiar adolescent themes. She injects with a lot of French culture and attitude but also much of that of America and England to give us a keen view into how multicultural France has become, particularly its younger citizens. At the start Lola even mentions entering her school gates like she's attending her prom, before emphasising that proms don't exist in France. And it has unisex resonance and likability because despite the title, it's actually an ensemble piece as it flits back and forth between Lola's misadventures and that of her girlfriends, Mael and Arthur and their gang, and also Paul-Henri (Emile Bertherat), the rebellious son of a local politician.
Azuelos' and co-writer Delgado Nans' intelligent screenplay also gives the cast consistently sharp dialogue, and from this they all give very natural and balanced performances, particularly Theret and Kapone (a real-life musician who actually performs a self-penned song here), and it even inserts some rather metafictional scenes which aren't jarring or forced, along with very patient and tender cinematography and a ripper soundtrack of chart hits. All this adds up to LOL (Laughing Out Loud) being a deliciously unique entry into a frequently tired genre.
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