Cuban-born Enrique Oliver claims to have learned English from Barbra Streisand records, which explains a lot about his tacky, wacky first feature Lola la Loca. The action is set in the Boston community of Jamaica Plain, where transplanted Cubans carry on as best they can. Like the synthetic tamales his mother was forced to concoct, Oliver has produced a parade of invented "types" to confound a timid social worker looking for her client, Dolores, known as Lola la Loca. In place of the conspicuously absent Lola, the social worker gets an earful about her from the neighbors, who include a practicing witch doctor and a woman who predicts the weather from a bullet lodged in her neck, a bespangled caveman and a becurlered soap-opera addict, a gang of young rappers and an old man who spews out Spanish aphorisms like a veritable font of wisdom. Oliver himself is our host, interpreting the scene and humorously addressing the stereotyping of Latin Americans. "I thought the meaning of life was for things to happen so we could talk about it," he muses, and indeed, Lola la Loca reveals the way narrative itself propels a culture. Like the experience of the spiritualista who "saw the Holy Ghost at a Tupperware party," this shaggy-dog story is full of meaningful surprises masquerading as so much hot air.