Product: Run, Lola, Run [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 4.0
She can scream too...
Loud enough to shatter glass.There are three keys to the success of this remarkable German language film (with English subtitles): originality of conception, crisp direction and editing, and two attractive stars to play the leads.The stars are Franka Potente, who plays ruby red-haired Lola, daughter of a banker. She is smitten with Manni, handsome young man played by Moritz Bleibtreu, who forgot to keep his grip on a bag containing 100,000 Deutsche marks belonging to his mobster boss. He is to hand over the money in twenty minutes, but he lost it on the train. (It was picked up by a homeless man.) Manni calls Franka and tells her the desperate straits he is in. He says his only out is to rob a store. She says no wait, she can come up with something. What that something is is dear old dad. She looks at the clock. It's twenty minutes until twelve. So Lola starts running to get to the bank and then to Manni before the stroke of noon.If you've seen Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coup (1959) then you know where director Tom Tykwer may have gotten the idea of showing us a Lola who runs like the wind. Truffaut used a sustained shot of his young hero running to convey an uplifting sense of freedom amid action. It worked for Truffaut and it works for Tykwer. Franka, running in nicely fitted pants and tank top (with her white lace bra strap discretely showing) really is a delight to watch. And like Truffaut, Tykwer does not let us see the runner sweat. There is a kind of effortless release, without any straining of our lungs. It is like running in our dreams.What Tykwer does with time is even more interesting. He has Lola run from her home to the bank to Manni three times, each time with a slight difference in the early events, leading to differences in the events to come. In the British movie Sliding Doors (1998) starring Gwyneth Paltrow, something of the same sort was tried with Gwyneth playing out two different permutations of her life based on decisions leading to differing scenarios. I'm also reminded of the brilliant American film, Memento (2000) directed by Christopher Nolan in the way some of the events are played over again. Here the scene as Lola runs by her mother on the telephone is the same three times, but then the differences begin. It might also be said that this movie is the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics brought to cinema. Or perhaps Tykwer was influenced by complexity theory in which a slight change in initial conditions can lead to large changes later on.The story (or rather stories: there are three of them) strain credulity at times. The awful things her "father" says to her in the first accounting seems too harsh and stupid to be real. The co-incidence of Manni's spotting the bum on the bicycle in the third tale seems a bit too lucky to be believed. And the allotment of twenty minutes of time in the three sequences was a bit off. However some of the other events seemed to me to be plausible or at least very clever and therefore allowable in an artistic sense. That the man in the ambulance regains a steady heart beat because she holds his hand is something this old guy can believe. And the cops mistaking her for a bystander in the bank robbery seems like credible cop behavior to me. And for those who think that the casino event was too much to believe, consider this: Assuming that the roulette wheels in Germany have both a zero and a double zero, the odds against betting on the number twenty and hitting it on consecutive spins of the wheel are 1/36 times 1/36 which equals about 77/100,000 or about 1300 to 1. It's a long shot, but nothing like winning the lottery. Incidentally she had in the bag 115,600 Deutsche marks (her initial 100 marks x 34 x 34).For those of you who haven't seen this remarkable film, consider this: it lasts 80 minutes, but it will seem like fifteen. The "throbbing techno score" is haunting and there are some nice action sequences. This is the kind of (R-rated, however) movie you can see with your teenaged son, although he would probably prefer to see it with his buds.