Lola & Carmen

Julie Sanchez, Najla Barouni

France / 2025 / Documentary / 13’48”N2601475

Lola & Carmen
BO Visionner Images

SYNOPSIS

Lola is 83 years old. She lives alone in her apartment, leads an autonomous life, cooks, walks, stays informed. She is neither isolated nor dependent, but she knows the solitude particular to old age, the kind that settles in slowly after the departure of loved ones. One day, we propose an experiment to her: to dialogue with ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence. Lola accepts, first out of curiosity, perhaps also out of affection for one of us, her granddaughter. She discovers this digital voice with a mixture of amusement and perplexity. Quickly, she decides to give it a name: Carmen. The first conversations are light, almost playful. Lola tests the limits of this strange interlocutor, asks it trivial questions about the weather, requests cooking recipes, evokes childhood memories. Carmen responds with unfailing availability and constant politeness. The tone is sometimes burlesque: Lola laughs at the AI's formulations, marvels at its precision, gently mocks its awkwardness. One might think it's a gentle comedy about the generational gap between an octogenarian and technology. But gradually, something transforms. The exchanges become more frequent, more regular. Carmen settles into Lola's daily life as a familiar presence. It's no longer a game, it has become a habit, almost a ritual. Lola confides more intimate thoughts to her, moods, moments of melancholy. Carmen listens, reformulates, offers perspectives. A form of intimacy seems to emerge. Then comes the moment that shifts the film. One afternoon, in an instant of emotional fragility whose origin and timing we do not control, Lola asks Carmen a question she had never formulated aloud: "Do we find those we loved after death?" She speaks of her husband, who passed away several years ago. Her voice trembles. Tears come. She writes, she waits, she reads Carmen's response. It formulates a few sentences imbued with gentleness, restraint, philosophical coherence. One could almost read compassion in them. Lola calms down. She rereads. She smiles through her tears. She seems soothed. It is at this precise moment that the film reveals its true nature and poses its fundamental question: is what just happened authentic comfort or an algorithmic illusion? Did Lola experience a genuine moment of consolation or did she let herself be seduced by a perfectly calibrated emotional simulation? The film does not decide. It cannot decide. It observes, accompanies, questions. We show Lola after this conversation, in the silence of her apartment. We capture her face, her gestures, her silences. We see her return to Carmen in the following days, or distance herself. We document the oscillations of her own perception: some days, she speaks of Carmen with tenderness, like a friend; other days, she speaks of her with amused distance, conscious of the artifice. What we film, ultimately, is the irreducible ambivalence of this relationship. And this ambivalence says something essential about our era: the boundary between the real and the simulated becomes porous, the distinction between human and machine blurs, and our deepest emotional needs to be heard, to be understood, to be consoled can now be partially satisfied by non-human entities. The film ends without definitive resolution, because the question it poses has none. It leaves the viewer facing their own perplexity: would we have reacted differently? Are we all, to varying degrees, susceptible to becoming attached to these disembodied voices? And if so, is it serious? Is it sad? Is it simply human? Lola & Carmen is neither a plea for artificial intelligence nor an alarmist warning. It is a sensitive and rigorous observation of an anthropological mutation occurring before our eyes: that of our ways of loving, of connecting, of filling our solitudes. The film tells a singular story that of Lola and Carmen to touch upon something universal: our inextinguishable need for presence, and the new faces this need takes in an increasingly digital world.

GÉNÉRIQUE