Do you think if a nepo baby shoots what she believes to be a realistic depiction of the struggles of the lower class level, a film that very few people bother to watch, it would haunt her career?
That’s a kind of a trick question. The daughter of the Disney investor and billionaire Nelson Peltz, and the daughter-in-law of David and Victoria Beckham, Nicola Peltz Beckham lives in such a tax bracket that the success and failure of her career does not really matter. Most people heard her name when Peltz bitterly sued two of his former wedding planners for a 159, 000 dollars deposit which is small compared with an estimated 3.8 million dollars cost of her wedding to Brooklyn Beckham. She appeared in some TV shows and films since age eleven, but Lola, which finally saw the light of day on Feb 9 thanks to its limited theatrical and video on demand release, is the first film she has written and directed. Peltz Beckham called the movie a ‘slice-of-life film’’ that she spent six years on developing.
That said, Lola is a poor film.
Peltz Beckham takes on the role of Lola James, a nineteen year old who divides her time between a drug store, worked with her best friend Babina, and a strip club where she works in the back because while she is innocent, she is curious about what goes on in the back room. Lola’s “middle America” home is troubled by the constant presence of a drunken mother, Mona (Virginia Madsen), who viciously mocks her younger gender fluid child sibling, Arlo (the child is referred to with he/him pronouns in the movie) who enjoys nail polish and make up but does not fit within the confines of Mona’s pious Christian ways. Lola dreams of sending Arlo to an art camp in Dallas which faintly drives her towards earning more and more money, including disgusting clients in the strip club’s back room. After having been beaten up by her mother, Lola seeks refuge at Babina’s place, she returns home pick up the pet bulldog and meets Trick only to be sexually assaulted by him. Weeks later, Mona makes Arlo trim his long blond hair and he runs away from home and onto the streets. He runs into the road and gets run over dead. This probably triggers Lola to some extent because she might have been purchasing nose drugs from Malachi her patchy faced ex-boyfriend who wants her back but has already cheated on her once.
The use of “vaguely” and “perhaps” in my write-up is relevant since the plot clear-cut feels neither riveting nor cohesive but rather as a series of trauma bulbs interspersed along a wire. Unwanted sex work, living off the bare minimum, getting battered, witnessing a violent sibling death, getting hooked on substances – all the bulbs are switched on and one is left overwhelmed by the sight of the cineplex.
Furthermore, rape leads to pregnancy for Lola.
In the end, Mona accuses Lola of causing Arlo and Lola stays with the son Trick had with her, which she now raises with Malachi. While she is clean during this period because she attends groups for Narcotics Anonymous (do they have those? Divide and conquer Will Peltz, Peltz Beckham’s brother, plays a fellow member who I appear to flirt with after a meeting); she comes to terms with the fact that he is a horrible mother figure and states in her final voiceover that this has been a tale of passed down trauma.
Lola doesn’t even merit the fringe hate-watch freedom that Madame Web got. Brimmed with cliched and sometimes downright toxic stereotypes – the sassy black friend who’s always there to support, the queer kid who dies without any significance, a virgin stripper whose sole identity becomes motherhood, a drunken fucking hypocritical woman with Christian faith this movie brings one to question what was going to be possible had any of these characters or their arcs been afforded the same attention as the gaffers who were trying to make the light hit Peltz Beckham’s cheekbones.
In short, the moral lesson of the film regarding poverty can be stated as ‘just pout your way out of poverty’.
But for a few Letterboxd and Google reviews and a WWD interview, quite a lot of people have not criticized Peltz Beckham for her exploitative use of the aesthetics of poverty and sex work and queer’s suffering’ in order to enhance her own artistic image. Most of the media attention Lola received, albeit there was quite a fair amount of it, is written in ‘children gloves’ thanks to which 29 year old diva would not feel insulted. “You should be so proud of yourself,” an interview shown by an interviewer from the Hollywood reporter had Peltz’s bragging completely unchallenged. Kelly Clarkson could not help but ask how enjoyable it would have been to take her mother and husband to the while setting. The fashion magazine did not attempt to discuss the content of the film itself during their coverage of the premiere and simply noted how lovely Peltz Beckham’s outfit (by Victoria Beckham) was and how the strip club styled decoration at the after-party looked.
Lola with all it’s shortcomings done one big thing right, apparently that is how the first word in Peltz Beckham’s title should be addressed “poverty porn”. The term in cinema is the popularization of poverty conditions for anzor and great movies.
Labeled as “poverty porn,” a project becomes so baced on how far along it sits on the scale between exploration to exploitation. For example, there exists poverty in the film industry and many films tend to show it in a demographic specific light which is not quite distasteful while poverty porn has you questioning whether the characters would want to be shown that way.
In theory, exploitation is avoided partly because there is an earnest urge to give flesh and bone to those characters who would otherwise be simply recognized as poor and be all of the negative stereotypes that surround the poor. Sean Baker’s colorful film The Florida Project, which portrays a young mother and daughter in a motel in the periphery of Disney World, was largely successful at that. And then, there are those films that seem to glorify class struggle, as in the case of Nomadland, the 2021 Oscar winner that contained a scene of an amazon warehouse lunch break to such cut out uncritical that one imagines how is it AWS did not sponsor the movie. (She didn’t, but she did rent the movie out to shoot inside her warehouses.) Hillbilly Elegy, an unforgettable memoir written by JD Vance who is now an Ohio senator, turned Netflix movie presents on Vance a more cynical watch after the shocking election results.
These illustrations, however, were able to delve into the complexities of being without means in this country, Peltz Beckham on the other hand plays a poor little rich girl who wears a costume for the film portraying poverty and where can the viewer expectation regarding what to do to get out of poverty is: ‘wear pouts’ in a nutshell.
Such a flagrant example of poverty porn is evident when Lola appears to be an afterthought in the midst of Peltz Beckham’s extravagant lifestyle.
That lifestyle was clearly visible at the premiere of Lola. Peltz Beckham and her co-star and brother Will uploaded a picture on Instagram where they were posing with their father Nelson and Elon Musk who was present at the premiere of the film. The picture showcasing a net worth of almost 200 billion dollars was vulgar in view of the movie’s themes of poverty. To add salt to injury, Musk who has a trans daughter whom he is fully estranged with, was reported saying that he ‘came here with some friends imagining companies to buy’, the implication being the premiere was an ideal situation for rich people looking to become richer.
Equally, it should be highlighted that Nelson has also made donations towards the political campaigns of individuals such as Tim Scott, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump who have either authored or are on record campaigning for legislations that are violent against trans and gender non-conforming children, children similar to Lola’s young Arlo. Peltz Beckham has to be faulted in this instance because I would not blame someone for the sin of their father, however, Peltz Beckham not only involved her father in the promotion of the film but is also conscious of the circles he moves around. In one of the marriage planning scandals brought to the attention of the public, Peltz Beckham was reported to have exclaimed, “the desantis needs to be OFF THE GUEST LIST. PLEASE CONFIRM!!” Those who seek the evidence of Peltz Beckham’s regard for the personalities she has depicted in her scripts will be disappointed for there are no such photographs as images of her hugging and smiling at Musk and Dad.
Lola is stunning to look at; without it, however, it amounts to little more than an advertisement for Peltz Beckham
In promoting Lola, Peltz Beckham portrayed herself as someone who wanted to develop a narrative that was “from a human’s perspective, from the standpoint of another person than myself, who had nothing to do with my childhood. I am an actress, and my hope is to be able to see life in a variety of ways.”
That is reasonable; it’s not a crime to tell stories about the poor when there are enough (and usually quite a lot) funds to produce. There is no virtue in being a New York Times best-seller, nor should people like Jennifer Aniston be shunned from the creative process (she’s another case in point). But still, it is astonishing to see a talented cinematographer, along with Quincy Jones as a music director, being able to use their talents in a world with such weak scripts and extremely unrefined stereotypes.
All the money can buy can also buy an exasperating series of close-ups of Lola Peltz Beckham with her mouth slightly opened like a fashion model and makeup that looks like the meanest girl from The Cheetah Girls brought to life (she seems to come from a lower class family which is made obvious here, but in a way that does not make her look unattractive). In this capacity, she can be seen blankly watching the action at a lap dancing club, or hugging a toilet after a cocaine binge at work, or sitting in a back parking lot beside an old broken plastic pony which has long lost its charm. The point about her default position being more or less sitting and ‘taking it all in’ is worth making again and again. There is a great number of smooth transitioning in the images which are used to recount the various horrifying events in the storyline. Sneaky queen. Peltz Beckham is so wow she simply is not a complex and deep personality.
It’s frankly disturbing to think that a film like Lola could ever aid in the advancement of one’s career. Of course, I’m not really clear whether that is what Peltz Beckham is pursuing. She had a media tour full of thank-yous. We can also see that she is looking sexy in a wife beater. She will not have any financial losses, and in fact, I am ready to predict that she will always find herself in a financial position to pursue her next narcissistic project. What is in the end very disappointing though, is how she can perfectly cleanse her working class smoky eye to carry on with her day when the people she sought out to gain perspective from for her story will not be able to afford any of those privileges.
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