Set in 50s, Germany (and shot in Germany) Lulu and Jimi is a fascinating look at the mindset of the battered German people post-war, incorporated into an interracial love story. It’s also fucking weird. The movie’s all over the map, incorporating different styles, genres into the story of a German girl falling in love with a jive-talkin, American black guy. I think I liked it, please don’t ask me why.
If you did ask, I’d probably tell you the cinematography is beautiful and that the whole thing is just so damn ambitious that hating it would be like kicking a puppy. Plus it has crazy dream sequences, attempted abortions, blacksploitation, rockabilly hepcats, musical numbers, gymnastic competitions, premature-ejaculating rapists, grindhouse homages (though maybe unintentional), bank heists, and evil ex-Nazi scientists who have turned to the occult. These are also probably reasons to dislike it.
The story goes a little something like this. Lulu (Jennifer Decker) is the daughter of a psychotic German family. She likes to hang out down at the local amusement park and ride the bumper cars. Jimi (Ray Fearon) runs the bumper cars and even though he’s black and she’s a German, she thinks he’s super hot. Well he is. They start dating, apparently oblivious to the fact that German pretty much invented racism, until something bad happens and it all goes to shit. Eventually they end up on the run and try to get to America where, apparently for some reason, they think the whole racism thing will be better. Well maybe it will be, but only in comparison to Nazis. It’s still the 50s after all.
You never really see much of Germany in the 50s on film. Usually it’s all either World War II and Hitler or maybe Germany a couple of years after we kicked their asses. This is a Germany which has already come to grips with its defeat and in the background of Lulu and Jimi’s romance the movie really does an interesting job of capturing the conflicted world leftover from the war. On the one hand it’s almost as if the German’s are trying to assimilate and become the open minded folk we know now, but on the other there’s still this undercurrent of resentment and hatred and racism which they sort of seem to feel guilty about but can’t get over.
But mostly, Lulu and Jimi is fucking weird.
