RUN LOLA RUN
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Son Pictures Classics Director: Tom Tykwer Writer: Tom Tykwer Cast: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Armin Rohde, Joachim Krol, Nina Petri
What would have happened if Lee Harvey Oswald missed? With JFK finishing out his term, the Vietnam War might have been over almost before it began. The hippie movement may never have ushered in a massive challenges of authority, and the U.S.--perhaps the entire Western World--might have retained the innocence of the 1950s. Go back a little further. What if Gavrilo Princip missed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914? World War I could have been avoided. Russia would not have had a communist revolution. With Germany no longer needing to make up for its defeat, World War II would not have occurred. Amazing, isn't it, what world-shaking changes could have taken place had the aim of two mentally disturbed marksmen been a bit off?
Getting down to a smaller scale, let's talk about you. How would you be different if you and your future spouse had not bumped into each other when you were both crossing that street after a day of shopping? Or how about that time in 1993 when you called your broker and ordered 1000 shares of plain old American Telephone and Telegraph instead of an equal allocation of America Online? If you had simply said "AOL" instead of AT&T, you'd be driving a Ferrari today instead of a Dodge Neon. What a difference a day makes.
And what a fascinating idea for a movie! "Now I long for yesterday" has been the theme of two fairly dependable films recently: Peter Howitt's "Twice Upon a Yesterday" and Maria Ripoli's "Sliding Doors," and some years back the subject of the hilarious Bill Murray vehicle, "Groundhog Day." But none of these three predecessors shares the particularly dynamic style of Tom Tykwer's incredibly fast-paced "Run Lola Run," which was justifiably a favorite at its North American introductions at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998 and more recently the Sundance Festival in Utah. Though a bit of a stretch, call this presentation the human equivalent of Anakin Skywalker's pod race in George Lucas's "Phantom Menace," in that its central character spends a good deal of her time running--not like a yuppie jogger but as though her life depended on her velocity. And indeed, her boy friend's existence does depend on her ability to accelerate on foot from 0 to 20 with scarcely a moment for a breather. Like the aforementioned movies, "Lola" has multiple outcomes--three, in fact--in each case its title character entreating the gods to get it right (like Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lena Headey and Douglas Henshall in the aforementioned movies) and yield the happy ending we in the audience wish for its likeable characters.
Write-director Tom Tykwer opens his swiftly-paced work by quoting a few philosphers' takes on the meaning of life, then kicks a metaphoric soccer ball into the heavens to start the fun. Lola (Franka Potente) receives a frantic phone call from her boy friend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who is desperate. Through his sheer, bubble-headed ineptitude Manni, who is a courier for a gangster, has mislaid a bag full of money that he is scheduled to deliver to his boss in just twenty minutes. If he cannot come up with the 100,000 marks, he will be killed. Somehow he trusts his girl to dig up the booty within that span of time and save his life. If Lola does not show up real soon, he will rob the supermarket across the street.
The story is told three separate times. In each case, something different happens to Lola that has a marked effect on the outcome of the story. Each time she asks her father, a high-ranking bank executive, to give her the sizable amount of money. And each time the result is distinctive, profoundly altering the course of the endeavor. While Franka Potente, with her flaming red hair, is the center of the film, director Tykwer does some interesting stuff with the side characters. Just as Lola's course of action in each take leads to a distinct outcome, so the activities of the people she literally runs into cause a kaleidoscopic array of aftermaths. But Tykwer flashes these hypothetical consequences before us so quickly that if you blink you will miss what is conceivably the most original and hilarious parts of the film.
In a director's statement, Tykwer announces his intention. "I always start with the image...I start wanting to get it moving, to build a story around it and then make a film out of it....it's when people move that they express things: despair, happiness, or whatever." In other words, Tykwer believes as many of us do that the last thing we want to see in the movies is talking heads--which is why photographed plays so often fail when adapted for the screen.
"Run Lola Run" is loaded with cinematic effects that in the hands of someone less professional than Tykwer could have come across as the work of an NYU film student: jump cuts, rapid pans, changes from video to film stock, and the interjection of animation that clones the activities of the real human beings. All of this works well because Tykwer has an uncanny ability to manipulate these images and what's more he has composed a thumping soundtrack that causes a film already on steroids to pump up the audience heartbeats.
While "Run Lola Run" is to a great extent a director's film, Tykwer could not have succeeded as he does without the electrifying young Frankie Potente whose painted, raggedy- Ann hairstyle could capture the attention of a teen audience just as the entire work secures the regard of film buffs of all ages. Distinguished Internet critic James Berardinelli says in his review, "it's the most fun I have had at any movie thus far in 1999." Amen to that.
Rated R. Running Time: 81 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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