Run Lola Run
**** (out of four)
Written and Directed by Tom Tykwer
Starring: Franka Potente as Lola Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni Herbert Knaup as Lolas Vater Nina Petri as Jutta Hansen
Run Lola Run could have been the new Pulp Fiction. It breathed life and electricity into a genre that seemed dead, or to most people, didn't even know existed. To write about it is to remember it's pulse, it's quick, lightning like photography and sound that rarely stopped, only to catch it's breath, then moved and ran, ran, ran - until at the end of the movie you were exhausted. As odd or cliche as this may sound, I left the theater catching my breath - feeling awkward that I was walking home rather than running.
Set to techno music, a rhythmic force of dance and action, the movie was paced like a cheetah running after it's prey. To sit still to it seemed unnatural. It blends animation, violence, love, revelation and hysterical action in an 85 minute movie. Five minutes of Lola is more entertaining than two hours of any recent Hollywood action film. The story is that Lola's boyfriend Manni, a drug dealer who has idiotically lost $100,000 on a subway, has 20 minutes to get it back or face death from the dealers. Lola runs to help him, thinking up different ways to get the money and avoiding pitfalls. Lola is a wonderful character, a new heroine that stands up to old female cliches, screams and shatters them. It's impossible to forget the vision of her running - red-hair like a fire on her head, running through the streets of Germany to save her boyfriends life.
Along the way, we see how split-second decisions and actions affect the rest of our lives. A boy offers to sell Lola his bike while she runs. She refuses, then immediately see several snapshots of him being mugged, beaten up, pity taken on him by a woman, and getting married to her. Tykwer makes a convincing life in the span of ten pictures. Snap, snap, snap, snap is your life. Depressing.
This is style merging effortlessly with substance. You couldn't have one without the other; the plot would die without Tykwer's speed-induced direction. But the direction is fun and plausible, instead of being a headache, because the setup presents a good life-or-death situation. It wastes no time to grab in an audience. Anything that seems out of place 0r silly is ignored because the movie goes too quickly to realize what is happening. Snap, snap, snap and the story jumps from a person who tells Lola to "Fuck Off" and then shows that woman's life.
That the movie wasn't more of a success in America surprises me. It is young and paced towards the 15-30 crowd, marketing's money darlings, the same crowd that producers created half of the past ten years of movies for. It offered many of the same qualities that made Pulp Fiction such a breakout. It was new, or seemed new anyway, with a direction and flash that inspired countless filmmakers to make direct photocopies. Audiences didn't seem to mind either, making Pulp Fiction and it's subsequent ripoffs lots of money. Lola also seemed to be fresh, in a different sort of way, but still fresh.
While it was a foreign film, complete with American-hated subtitles, this could have been overcome with a wide release and any sort of marketing campaign. Just a few trailers could have sparked interested. The success of this film was due solely to work of mouth. It played in independent theaters (the one I saw it in offered pillows to replace the dilapidated seat cushions). However, Lola wasn't given a wide release and suffered. What could have been a Blair Witch Project, was instead made into an Afterlife.
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