Run Lola Run (1998) 81m.
Guaranteed big-screen crowd-pleaser from writer-director Tom Tykwer: it's a welcome change from the Teutonic gloom we normally get imported from Germany for film festivals. Premise reads like a parallel universe joke, but is executed like a music video: Vermilion-haired Lola (Frunka Potente) gets a panicky phone call from her boyfriend Manni (Mortiz Bleibtreu). He needs to come up with 100,000 marks in twenty minutes or his life is forfeit. Using only a moment to think what to do, Lola immediately hot-foots it out of her apartment to save him. Energetic, rocket-paced film dispenses with its plot in the twenty minutes - as promised - but then whips everything back to where it started to replay it a second, and then third time. It seems that everything we do in life is so contrived of the most infinite circumstances that this story can replay itself endlessly with infinite conclusions: even the people Lola passes in the street have different destinies that are compressed to flash by us in seconds.
Despite the threat of assassination that hangs over the proceedings, RUN LOLA RUN is very light, and abounds with humorous twists and surprises (one hilarious moment finds Lola outside a bank confronted by the police). Appropriately, Tykwer has treated the exercise as a game: there is no need for us to be concerned about the lives or deaths of these characters as they are constantly re-invented. He also has remixes of the same tune throughout the film complementing the 'variations on a theme' storyline. And, notably, the cause-and-effect logic of the story is punctuated by constant collisions or near-misses - nearly everyone has a run-in with a car, bicycle, truck, ambulance, pedestrian, or stroller as if they were so many hypercharged electrons bumping off each other, splitting and merging into their own quantum-level parallel universes. Another admirable element of the film is its purely cinematic value - you'll be so caught up in its constant movement (of course the only shot of the sky just has to have a passenger jet swooping by) that you probably won't even notice the absence of special effects. Using every crane trick, slow-motion, pixillation, camera angle and editing device at his disposal Tykwer manages to pull off a highly visual treat created almost entirely within camera. It's prime material for some needless, overbudgeted Hollywood remake. And yes, Lola really does run. Potente must have been exhausted by the time this shoot was over.
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