Run Lola Run (1998)
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Review #1,451 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu
Plot: After a botched money delivery, Lola has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks.
Genre: Crime / Drama / Thriller
Awards: Won Audience Award (Sundance). Nom. for Golden Lion (Venice). Nom. for 1 BAFTA - Best Foreign Language Film
Runtime: 80min
Rating: PG for some violence and language
International Sales: Bavaria Film International
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: MILD)
“The ball is round, a
game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theory. Off we go!”
Tom
Tykwer isn’t exactly a great filmmaker, but he made one of the most
exhilarating thrillers of the 1990s. Competed
for the Golden Lion at Venice, Run Lola
Run is a postmodern work of high energy and stylistic excess, in the vein
of a race-against-time movie with a high-concept premise: Lola (Franka Potente)
must find 100,000 Deutschmarks in 20 minutes for her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz
Bleibtreu), before he is compelled to rob a major supermarket.
It’s
a life-or-death situation for Manni as he is tasked to return the dough, which he
inexplicably lost, to his uncompromising mob boss. Set to the rhythmic tempo of an electronic
score by Tywker himself and co-composers Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek, Run Lola Run moves along kinetically, an
effect wildly accentuated not only by its soundscape, but through the flashy
editing—sometimes literally the flashing of still photos of certain characters'
past (or is it future?) whom Lola crosses paths with—and dazzling camerawork
that gives us all manner of shot angles.
The
stylistic devices employed may seem superfluous to the uninitiated, or
pretentious to the cynic, but for a film that is largely inspired by video
games and MTV, it feels just about right.
Structured in three main ‘acts', with each part resetting the clock to
when Lola begins her mission, Tykwer's work is one of those films that
liberates itself from time, even if it is constrained by it.
From
a more philosophical point-of-view, Run
Lola Run is about the tension between the random and the predestined. The people whose paths we cross form an
interconnected web of chance and fated encounters, irreversibly affecting each
own path. The constant mutability of
this web gives life its flavourful unpredictability, marked by the twin poles
of opportunity and tragedy.
Of
course, Run Lola Run only just
manages to graze the surface of its own philosophy, trading substance for
style. But for what it is, the film is
surprisingly thoughtful in its portrayal of human connectedness, between
strangers and the familiar.
Run Lola Run was one of the first
films I saw that opened the window for me to foreign language films back when I
was a college kid in 2005. Considering
the sheer breadth and depth of world cinema, Tykwer’s film remains an
entertaining oddity—like Lola herself, a problem child with flamed hair and
all. It is also one of contemporary
German cinema’s high points before the turn of the century. I bet people were gasping at how gleefully
fun a German film could be, if it wanted to.
Verdict: This unpredictable and exhilarating race-against-time
thriller, shot and edited in an innovative hyper-kinetic style, is one of
contemporary German cinema’s high points before the turn of the century.
GRADE: A
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